Claudia Ulloa Donoso is an expert at writing gently alienated characters. Sometimes, their dislocation is the result of geography. Occasionally, it stems from their social conditions: consider "Alarm," in which every sound and moment is skewed by the narrator's terror of her abusive partner, or "The Transfiguration of Melina," whose religious teenage heroine starts the story detached from her sexuality, and ends it anything but. More often, though, Claudia's characters are simply Martians: their perspective on the world is singular, whether they want it to be or not.

About the Author

Claudia Ulloa Donoso was born in Lima in 1979. She is the author of the short story collections El pez que aprendió a caminar, Séptima Madrugada, and Pajarito. Claudia has been recognized by critics and readers as one of the most original and surprising voices in Latin American literature. In 2017 she was included in the Bogotá39, a selection from Hay Festival of the best fiction writers under 40 from across Latin America. Her work has been translated into English, French, Swedish, and Italian. She currently lives north of the Arctic circle in Bødo, Norway, where she teaches Spanish.

Lily Meyer is a writer, translator, and critic. Her recent translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird (Deep Vellum; 2021) and now Ice for Martians. Lily is a PhD candidate in fiction at the University of Cincinnati. She is a two-time fiction grant recipient from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and won the Sewanee Review fiction contest in 2018. Her short stories appear in Catapult, The Drift, The Masters Review, The Sewanee Review, and Soft Punk, and her criticism appears in The Atlantic, The Nation, Public Books, and NPR Books.