Half a century after a group of Latin American writers rose to global stardom by channelling the magic and drama of their region, a new generation of authors from the continent has emerged to international acclaim, but with very different profiles and priorities.

Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realist epic, One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967, is regarded as the lodestone for what became known as the Latin American literary “Boom”. The Colombian’s success was soon followed by that of Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, author of Conversation in a Cathedral. Mexican Carlos Fuentes and Argentinian Julio Cortázar were among the other names who formed a group which garnered both critical admiration and enormous commercial success.

Their work remains popular and highly regarded: 10 years on from García Márquez’s death, a Netflix adaptation of his masterpiece is being released and his fellow Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, now 88, has only just retired from writing fiction. But while the members of the so-called Boom cast a long shadow over Latin American literature for decades, a group of writers who could be their grandchildren – or, more specifically, their granddaughters – have finally stepped out from it.

“For the first time ever, the dominant [Latin American] writers are women,” says the Peruvian novelist Gabriela Wiener.

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Besides Wiener, they include Selva Almada and Samanta Schweblin from Argentina, Mónica Ojeda and Natalia García Freire from Ecuador, Paulina Flores from Chile, and Guadalupe Nettel from Mexico. All have been translated into English and many are on the radar of prize juries – Wiener and Almada made this year’s International Booker Prize longlist (Almada’s spare and chilling novel set in rural Argentina, Not a River, reached the shortlist).

“There was this erroneous idea that the male outlook was universal,” Wiener tells The Irish Times. “And that lie has been exposed as women have started to look at each other and recount other experiences with other points of view. A lot of readers didn’t feel represented or acknowledged before and so perhaps they didn’t fully enjoy the literature that came before, out of the 20th century.”

The original writers regarded as belonging to the Boom inner circle were all men – to the exclusion of some prominent woman authors, such as Brazil’s Clarice Lispector and Mexico’s Elena Garro – and their writing reflected the Latin American male perspective of the time.

By contrast, Wiener explores the female experience in unflinchingly intimate detail.

Her absorbing novel Undiscovered also examines the legacy of colonialism and what it means to be a Latin American migrant in Spain. The narrator recounts the twists in her own polyamorous and family relationships as well as expressing growing misgivings about being the great-great-granddaughter of a European explorer who appears to have been involved in colonial pillaging.

“God is white,” she writes. “Or at least that’s what we’ve been told. The coloniser is white. History is white and male.”

Valerie Miles is the co-founder, with Aurelio Major, of the Spanish edition of Granta magazine, which has promoted many of the new Latin American voices. She agrees that until relatively recently there was a gap on bookshelves across the continent.

“The big, blank space was: what is the woman experience?” she says. “And there are several writers who are extremely talented who have put in the hours and are coming up with extraordinary stories.”

She adds: “Because the literary establishment is giving women prizes, talking about them, giving them fellowships and so on, it helps. But the main thing is that women are reading women. The market has decided.” She points out that 70 per cent of readers in Spanish are woman.

Another dimension of this new wave of writing is that it has coincided with a period of political and social instability in the region.

In Venezuela, the chaos under left-wing firebrand Nicolás Maduro has caused nearly eight million people to flee the country, according to Amnesty International.

At the other extreme of the political spectrum, Jair Bolsonaro, a Trumpian with authoritarian tendencies, instigated a Brazilian version of the January 6 insurgency when he and his supporters refused to accept electoral defeat; in Argentina, president Javier Milei has divided the country with his far-right libertarian economics and verbal belligerence.

Almada draws a direct link between her own writing and her native Argentina’s socio-economic trauma. Not a River tells the story of three friends who spend several days in the countryside fishing, drinking and remembering a dark episode from their past, before things turn violent. It could hardly be further removed from the abstract urbanity of her countryman, Jorge Luis Borges.

“The characters in my novel ... are a reflection of what the neoliberalism of the 1990s has done to Argentina,” Almada has said, “impoverishing it, condemning a significant part of its citizens to poverty and marginalisation.”

Similarly, Ojeda tells The Irish Times that her native Ecuador “is a country which has always been in crisis, but now we are living in particularly dark times, with a neoliberal president [Daniel Noboa] who thinks the country is his personal hacienda.”

Yet she adds that Ecuador is “part of my biographical body – how could I write without it?”.

It is not just politics or poverty which keep Latin America in a state of turmoil. The previously peaceful Ecuador is now prey to the kind of drug-related violence which has ravaged Mexico in recent years. Neighbouring Colombia is relatively calm after decades of war between guerrillas and the army, but Peru has been struggling for stability ever since the Maoist Shining Path waged a campaign of terrorism throughout the 1980s.

Wiener suggests that this baggage feeds into the continent’s culture.

“We know that we have a brutal colonial legacy, of violence and racism, of being looted by the United States, of dictatorships,” she says. “For me, Latin America is a living being, it’s radical, extreme, full of fascinating stories – you can see that it’s not old Europe – and so our literature is like that too.”

Valerie Miles points to “that violence which is always just under the surface and which can erupt at any time” as an unignorable presence for writers from the region. As an example, she points to one incident in 2014, when joy turned to horror as celebrations over a Colombian victory in the football World Cup got out of control and nine people died in Bogotá.

In her short story collection Seven Empty Houses, which won the US National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2022, Argentina’s Schweblin taps into this dark undercurrent by describing outlandish events interrupting everyday scenes.

Ojeda does so in a more shocking way, with supernatural and Gothic undertones and often drawing from Andean myth and ritual, as in her novel Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun. In one of the Ecuadorian’s short stories, a humdrum calm is shattered when a woman discovers that her neighbour, a respectable doctor, has decapitated his teenage daughter. In another, a girl fantasises about cutting off her twin sister’s tongue.

“When you’re standing next to a volcano you know it could destroy you in two seconds,” Ojeda told Festival 42 in Barcelona recently. “And yet, people settle down right next to volcanoes, it’s a kind of acceptance: this is life, life is not about being safe.”

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She tells The Irish Times: “I believe that we should all care about the way in which we relate to the territory we inhabit, or where we have made our home, the places which have affected us in some way. Oral narratives can capture collective thought when it comes to territory and history.”

Ojeda, like Wiener, is based in Madrid. Several acclaimed young Latin American writers live in Spain – something they share with their forebears, who in the 1970s converged on Barcelona, home of their formidable literary agent Carmen Balcells. But, while Spain remains a hub for the Ibero-American book industry, many of the Latin American writers who have come here have done so for reasons other than literary ambition.

Wiener, who moved from Peru to Spain long before becoming a published writer, is quick to distance herself from the idea that she is retreading the path of the superstar writers of yesteryear.

“Right now, there’s nothing romantic about being a writer in Europe,” she says. “We’re not following in the footsteps of the Latin American Boom, looking for a garret in Paris where we can write a book in a fit of inspiration. We are descendants of working writers, like [Chilean] Roberto Bolaño, who was a migrant. I owe more to that legacy.”

Many of these writers give short shrift to the “New Boom” tag which is often attached to them. Wiener calls it “a book-marketing label”, and although she admires the work of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, she sees much of the politics of that generation as “really embarrassing”.

“The Latin American Boom was a phenomenon that made a lot [of women] invisible, which is why I push back against the term,” the Uruguayan Fernanda Trías, author of the acclaimed novel The Rooftop, has said. “It’s a little ironic that it’s now being used to describe us.”

But, regardless of the name used to describe them, this generation of writers has already created a body of work that sets them defiantly apart from their forebears and which is making waves beyond the Spanish-speaking world. When last year’s Booker Prize winner, Paul Lynch, was asked why Ireland produces so many fine writers, he replied: “Can I let you into a secret? I think South America has the best writers.”

Many will agree with his appraisal, although the literary prowess of South – and Central – America is now hardly a secret.

Granta in Spanish