Samanta Schweblin

Schweblin was born in Buenos Aires and studied filmmaking before turning to fiction, publishing story collections that won Argentina's Casa de las Américas prize and the Juan Rulfo prize while she was still in her twenties, building a reputation for tightly coiled, unsettling short fiction well before her first novel appeared.

Fever Dream (2014) compresses her entire method into one unbroken conversation: a dying woman, Amanda, and a boy named David racing against her fading consciousness to pinpoint the moment her daughter crossed the 'rescue distance' separating her from fatal danger, an agrochemical poisoning mystery told entirely through unbearable present-tense urgency.

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the novel established her internationally; she has continued writing spare, dread-saturated fiction (including the story collection Mouthful of Birds and the novel Little Eyes) and now divides her time between Buenos Aires and Berlin.