Martha Bátiz
Martha Bátiz is an award-winning writer, translator, and professor of Spanish language in literature. She is the author of four books, including the story collection Plaza Requiem (Exile Editions, 2017), winner of an International Latino Book Award, and the novella The Wolf’s Mouth, winner of the Casa de Teatro Prize. Born and raised in Mexico City, she lives in Toronto.
No Stars in the Sky
Published by House of Anansi Press
A new collection of hard-hitting and intimate stories by award-winning Mexican Canadian author Martha Bátiz.
“These are stories for the twenty-first century. Their geography is as vast as their violence. Bátiz has a powerful gift for empathy, entering the mind of a disappeared boy in Argentina, a fourteen-year-old girl exploited at the US/Mexico border, female asylum seekers sharing their grief. The power of these stories comes from the writer’s understanding of the politics of exploitation and her refusal to look away” -Rosemary Sullivan, author of Stalin’s Daughter
The nineteen stories in No Stars in the Sky feature strong but damaged female characters in crisis. Tormented by personal conflicts and oppressive regimes that treat the female body like a trophy of war, the women in No Stars in the Sky face life-altering circumstances that either shatter or make them stronger, albeit at a very high price. True to her Latin American roots, Bátiz shines a light on the crises that concern her most: the plight of migrant children along the Mexico–U.S. border, the tragedy of the disappeared in Mexico and Argentina, and the generalized racial and domestic violence that has turned life into a constant struggle for survival. With an unflinching hand, Bátiz explores the breadth of the human condition to expose silent tragedies too often ignored.