Jeudi en résidence avec Elaine Vilar Madruga
The Beauty of Darkness: A Talk on Everyday Delirium and Terror

Thursday 9 April 2026, 19:00

Book

Entrance

Free, under reservation

Language

Event in Spanish, translated to French

Every first Thursday of each month, from 7 to 8 pm, a writer in residence opens a window on his or her work, universe and motives, in a free form of intervention. An hour of carte blanche to share, followed by an aperitif.

During this Thursday in residency, Elaine Vilar Madruga will offer an exploration of her most recent writing through the compositional and literary strategies that led to the creation of her novels The Tyranny of Flies, The Cavities, and What the Forest Devours.

This talk approaches the beauty of darkness as a symbolic representation of reality; dystopia as a metaphor for the everyday; estrangement as a literary device; and the non-mimetic as an unsettling reflection of the world.

Concepts such as fear, the recovery of memory, the archetypal, the sensitive and sensory dimensions of remembrance, and literature as both testimony and political body accompany us on this literary journey with a Caribbean author who fiercely defends the right to hybridity and to rage.

Biography

The Cuban novelist, poet, and playwright Elaine Vilar Madruga was born in Havana in 1989. She also works as a journalist and teacher of creative writing. Translated into several languages and hailed by critics internationally, her publications run from juvenilia and collections of short stories and poems, to a dozen novels that include Salomé (La Pollera, 2018), La tiranía de las moscas (Barrett, 2021) and El cielo de la selva (Lava, 2023). Mixing realism and fantasy, and often tinged with horror, her books examine the failings of the contemporary world through a feminist lens. The Tyranny of Flies, translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn, was published by HarperVia in 2024.

In residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation

From 16 March to 13 April 2026