Claudia Pineiro was a journalist, playwright and television scriptwriter and in 1992 won the prestigious Pléyade journalism award. She has more recently turned to fiction and is the author of literary crime novels that are all bestsellers in Latin America and have been translated into four languages. Thursday Night Widows won the Clarin Prize for fiction and was her first title to be available in English. All Yours and A Crack in the Wall followed on from their success.
As Pineiro has said:
“I’ve been writing fiction for as long as I’ve know how to write, that is since the age of five, when I was taught the alphabet at school and how those letters form words, and the words sentences, and the sentences paragraphs, and the paragraphs stories. I wouldn’t be the person I am if I didn’t write. Writing is part of my constitution.
All the stories I write are fictions and yet they all contain a part of me, even if that isn’t obvious to the reader. Writing lets me find words for the silences that have existed in my own life. I look at the reality around me and turn it into fiction. I change it, inventing characters, but that seed that will later grow into a novel always contains an image of my own life. In Thursday Night Widows, I used fiction to write about the way certain social groups lived in 1990s Argentina, unaware that they were walking blindly towards the economic crisis of 2001 (which was similar to the 2008 crisis in Europe). In All Yours I examined the hyprocrisy and obsession with appearances of a middle class family that pretends to be something it isn’t. In A Crack In The Wall, the context is the property market and the corruption that permeates every level of society, but also mid-life crisis and marriage as an institution. “
