Writer Mariana Enriquez speaks about moving to Australia — ABC News Australia

Argentine horror writer Mariana Enriquez, who moved from Buenos Aires to Launceston, Australia, spoke about getting used to the nighttime darkness of the suburbs and the impact of Argentina’s military dictatorship on her work. As ABC News Australia reports, the writer and her husband moved to the country about a year ago because of economic instability in Argentina.

Enriquez recalled that after watching the Australian horror film Bring Her Back, she became frightened while walking home from the cinema. According to her, in Buenos Aires, a dark, unlit street usually means danger or an abandoned place that should be avoided. It took the writer time to break the habit of constantly being alert and expecting possible threats.

The experience of dictatorship

Enriquez was about two years old when the period of military dictatorship began in Argentina in 1976 and lasted seven years. During that time, about 30,000 people disappeared. Although democracy was restored in 1983, the writer noted that this period and the subsequent public reckoning with the scale of the crimes significantly shaped her imagination and sense of anxiety.

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She also recalled the everyday surveillance that affected even people’s private lives, including children’s parties and the number of guests at home. According to Enriquez, understanding that writers could be made to disappear in one of more than 500 secret prisons only strengthened her determination to write.

Horror and collective trauma

Enriquez is considered one of the leading authors of the New Argentine Narrative, a movement in which predominantly women writers address the collective past through dark stories. Her work is associated with examining the consequences of dictatorship and social anxiety.

Flinders University creative writing lecturer Alex Cothren, who hosted Enriquez as a writer-in-residence, said that horror gives Argentine authors an opportunity to speak about deep trauma outside the language of realism. He also named economic crises as one of the factors affecting the country’s creative context. Enriquez’s story My Sad Dead became the basis for a Netflix series, which, according to ABC News, premiered on September 24. In October, the writer is set to appear at the Brisbane Writers Festival.