| Biographical note |
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  'Susana Medina's writing displays a sense of elegant engagement with a minatory world, the prose is both spare and lush, and there's a commendable tension about the enterprise.' Will Self SUSANA MEDINA was born in England (Hampshire) in 1966 to a German mother of Czech origin and a Spanish father. After living a few months in Germany, her family moved to Spain (Valencia) in 1968, where she was brought up. Having read on book covers that writers often lived elsewhere, she came to London when she was 19 years old. Fascinated by the city's mishmash of cultures and subcultures, she stayed on and studied History of Art and Italian at University College London, then lived for a year in Venice and Bologna where she studied at DAMS under Umberto Eco and Dario Fo. Although more or less resident in London since 1987, she has written in Spanish, her native tongue, until recently. Trozos de Una (Chunks of One), an anti-novel written when she was 25 years old, won a Generalitat Writing Grant. It was followed by Cuentos Rojos (Red Tales, 1997) which includes the Max Aub International Short Story Prize and the acclaimed poetry collection Souvenirs del Accidente (2004). Philosophical Toys (2007), is her first novel in English, an offspring from which is the highly praised short film Buñuel's Philosophical Toys (24 mins), shown internationally. She has always written across a number of art forms, being interested in the gaps between the arts, genres and disciplines, the playful and the dead serious ("Coherence is often confused with homogeneity. In order to be coherent, art should shoot in all directions", she says in Souvenirs from the Accident). In 1992 and 1993, she curated various well received international art shows, notably Space International and Reproductions in conjunction with video-artist Derek Ogbourne and John Russell (editor of Frozen Tears) and has collaborated with artists, magazines on the arts, publishing and delivering a number of essays on art, literature, cinema and photography. Her literary work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines and has been translated into several languages. She is currently co-editing an anthology of Spanish short stories and is a voluntary translator for English PEN, Writers in Prison Programme. Borgesland, A voyage through the infinite, imaginary places, labyrinths, Buenos Aires and other psychogeographies and figments of space , her PhD thesis on imaginary spaces in the oeuvre of Jorge Luis Borges, was awarded on June 2006 at Birkbeck College, London, where she originally gained her MA in Hispanic Studies. She currently lectures at the Open University. Other honours include an Arts and Humanities Research Board Grant, the Snowdon Award and more recently a substantial Arts Council Writing Grant (February 2008) for her new novel Spinning Days of Night. You can contact her literary agent, John Parker (parker@zenoagency.com) at Zeno Agency You can also join Susana at MySpace: Susana Medina and Facebook Susana Medina |
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