With an emerging voice, the writer and actress Patricia Fernández, better known as Nona Fernández, opens the way in the historical memory of her country during the dictatorship. From the scene to the page, Nona fuses word and body to give voice to the wounds of those who are not part of the story told by the victors.
His stories, which evoke a shared memory in Latin America, will be represented in body and word by the writer during the Central America festival, at the end of this month.
When does Nona Fernández begin to write?
I am an actress. I studied theater at the Catholic University of Chile and, although that was my professional training, I always wanted to write. Scripture seduced me, but I didn’t know how one could become a writer.
Unlike the theater, which has a formal path, of course, for me literature was a mystery. During the dictatorship, I grew up in the middle of a cultural blackout. I had no access to writers or know how to approach them. But, with the arrival of democracy, in the 1990s, while studying theater, literary workshops began to bloom in Santiago de Chile.
I launched them. I learned with Carlos Cerda, Antonio Skármeta, Pía Barros, Amela Altit … It was a bum that, until today, is still part of the Chilean literary tradition.
In those workshops I understood that writing was a trade: an exercise of insistence, personal work. Unlike the theater, where I graduated and obtained a title, in writing I had to name myself.
First I did it as a game, but over time it became something more serious. At first, I separated my paths: the actress and the writer. Over the years, I understood that I am one. That these two expressive platforms cross, dialogue and define me.
Literature appeared as a space to investigate those dark areas. It allowed me to investigate both in the historical archive of the country and in that of my community, my family, my friends. And, from there, from those experiences marked by apparently distant, but deeply personal events, my books began to emerge.
Patricia Fernández will participate in the Central America Festival on May 21 and 24, held in Guatemala. (Photo: Free Press / Courtesy: Nona Fernández)
What inspires you to write and why says your stories are a hunt?
I do not consider myself a very imaginative woman. Always childbirth of a file, of something that really happened. There the idea of the “hunt” is born: I go out to the world with open antennas, as with an invisible basket, collecting stories that touch me, that bother me, that I am passionate about.
Sometimes they are facts that come from the Historical Archive of Chile; others, from the memory of my family or my neighborhood. I pick them up, I investigate them and, in that process, a book appears. Some are born almost entirely from the file, others are fictions built from it.
The funny thing is that, while I write a book, another file usually appears, another story, another question that takes me to the next.
This has been since Mapochomy first novel. It is like putting together a map of the not said, illuminating a territory from small findings that are chained book after book.
Today I know that I write from the present to look to the past and understand it. Because that past still crosses us. And because the small lives – like mine and that of so many others – have also been molded by the great facts of history.
How was your performatic reading and how do you take your books to the stage?
I have always been a mixture: actress and writer. That duality took me, almost naturally, to experiment with hybrid forms.
In Chile, several of my novels such as Space Invaders and Voyager They have had theatrical adaptations. They cease to be books and transform: a cast, an direction, art intervenes. They are no longer just words: they are body, scene, action.
How to remember thirst It was born like this. I wrote it for the Book Fair of Buenos Aires (Filba), for the commemoration of the 50 years of the coup in Chile.
In his first version it was just a reading, almost a conference. But, as an actress, I know how to read with other codes. I do not read as an author, I read as an interpreter. And, in the midst of that reading – in a frightful room, with bad light and a lot of noise – something happened.
Fernández was a candidate for the National Book Award 2019 for his novel Space Invaders .. (Art: Free Press / Flor López)
That invisible connection that sometimes ignites between scenario and public. I knew that this text had a scenic dimension that should explore.
Because, when I read as an actress, words reach the heart faster. The reading alone can do it, yes, but the body shortens the distance. And that is what I am looking for: that my texts not only awaken ideas, but they touch fibers.
Over time I have understood that writing is not just telling a story, but printing a point of view. And that this point of view can also be translated into the scene.
Writing was first a game; Now it is a race that still plays. A space of freedom, of constant experiment. Literature, such as theater, has no limits. And our expression, either.
Why is it so important that literature is the voice of history?
Because official history usually has an owner. And, almost always, that owner is the winner.
I come from a country – like so many others in Latin America and the world – that has gone through authoritarian regimes. Today, we even see how certain conservative forces advance back to those same places. And that advance fills us with restlessness.
In that context, literature becomes fundamental: it is a space to count from the margins, from what was left out of the official story.
The story, capitalized, is closed. It is the story we learned in school books, which was written by those who had power. But those of us who grew up – the common people, the small people, as I like to say – we also have something to tell.
And there literature enters: as a tool to break those limits, to read between the lines, to open cracks and strain for them.
When we write, we appropriate the silences. We put on the table the facts that no one has spoken. We play, imagine, and in that gesture we say: this is also a version, a way of looking. It is an act of resistance, but also repair.
Literature has a power that goes beyond the testimonial. Not only reinterprets the past, he also anticipates. Many times it comes before historical processes.
What book do you currently work in?
I work in a strange book. This is defined by its protagonist. And maybe he is right.
It is inspired by the figure of Mauricio Hernández Norambuena, former member of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, an armed group that, in the darkest years of the Chilean dictatorship, tried, without success, attempt against Pinochet.
He was part of that operation. Today he has been in absolute isolation for more than 23 years, held in a high security prison.
For three years I kept a dialogue at the distance. This book is born from that sustained conversation, from that attempt to enter the psyche of someone who has inhabited the confinement for more than two decades.
In 2002, Fernández published his acclaimed Mapocho novel, a work with which he was awarded the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award. (Photo: Free Press / Courtesy: Nona Fernández)
It is an immersion in its history, but also in the history of the armed struggle in Chile, the one that rarely enters the official stories.
It is not a biography or a conventional chronicle. It is a narrative exploration – intense, at times uncomfortable – about what it means fighting a regime, losing and living locked up with that memory. It is also an attempt to bring to light an enclosed story, shape, body, word.
For me, this book is a way to break the limits of official history, to go for that little bit hidden from the past and put it in front of us. Because everything that is not counted, everything that is silent, also deserves to take a place in reality. And literature can give it to him.
What symbolize the prizes for writers of historical memory?
The awards are pretty. Not because a scribe to receive them, but because, when they arrive, they validate something essential: that what you are doing not only belongs to you. That this need to connect, to say something, is happening in another person, elsewhere, in someone who does not know you, but has read you.
I understood that above all with my first awards. It was no longer just my friends or my family who read my books. They were people who think of literature, read carefully, to recognize a voice. And that, when one is starting, means a lot. He tells you: “This you are making makes sense, it continues there.”
One of the most important awards for me was Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, which awarded the Guadalajara Book Fair. He opened an international door.
Thanks to that recognition, people who would never have had access began to read me – no interest – in my work. And there I understood that my stories, so Chilean, so neighborhood, could also dialogue with the world. That connection with the human, with the universal, is the greatest gift that I have received as a writer.
But I also learned that it is not written for awards. It is a mistake to think about them as a goal. Scripture cannot twist in search of applause. The awards are a consequence of a path made with work, passion and truth. There is no formula, there is no strategy. There is insistence, there is look and there is trade. And, when all that aligns, sometimes, the awards arrive. And when they arrive, they help to understand everything you were doing.
I write from the wound, from memory and from the urgency of understanding us.
Chilean writer Nona Fernández will present her performance reading of the work. How to remember thirst?, On Saturday, May 24, during the Central America Festival, 2025. (Photo: Free Press / Daniel Corvillón)