Everything you need to know about Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Who are the author and translator? 

Fernanda Melchor was born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, and is a writer and journalist who lives and works in Puebla. She graduated with a degree in journalism from the Universidad Veracruzana in her home state, and has written fiction and non-fiction for several international publications, including the Paris Review, Le Monde and GQ. Her accolades include winning the PEN Mexico Award for Literary and Journalistic Excellence in 2018 and, in 2019, winning the International Literature Award, for the German translation of Temporada de huracanes, her second novel, which was originally published in 2017. Her first two books were published in 2013: Falsa liebre, a novel, and Aquí no es Miami, a collection of literary journalism. The English translation of the latter, This is Not Miami, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in September 2023. Sophie Hughes’s English translation of Temporada de huracanes, Hurricane Season, was published in 2020. 

Sophie Hughes is a literary translator from Spain who was born in Chertsey, UK. Her translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2019. In 2020, her co-translation of Enrique Vila-Matas’ Mac and His Problem was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. In the same year, she was also shortlisted for Hurricane Season. She won the 2021 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize. Hughes also translated Melchor’s fourth book, Paradais, which was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the LA Times Book Prize. 

What were Fernanda Melchor’s inspirations? 

In a 2019 interview, Melchor said: ‘I didn’t want the book to just be a collection of testimonies; I wanted it to have a kind of unity’. To achieve this unity she deftly manages voice and structure, inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch. 

Melchor has cited a number of other authors that inspired her, including Roberto Bolaño, Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King; growing up she was a fan of horror. The book takes some features from crime fiction and could be read as an unconventional murder mystery. In a 2020 interview with Sophie Hughes, Melchor recounts buying her first books at the age of 12, Perfume and The Silence of the Lambs. She said, ‘I’ve always been obsessed with murder stories, especially those centred in the figure of the offender, the mad, the fallen’. Despite the complexity and upsetting nature of Hurricane Season, Melchor still wanted it ‘to have real depth without compromising readability. I’ve always envied the apparent ease of the most commercial page-turners’. 

Her home state of Veracruz is a key inspiration behind all Melchor’s literary work to date, including Hurricane Season. In a 2022 interview she said, ‘Everything good, and everything bad, that has come into Mexico – and the American continent – first arrived in Veracruz. It’s a puerto [port] and a puerta [door].’ The Spanish conquest by Hernán Cortés in the early 16th Century brought large parts of Mexico under the rule of the Kingdom of Castile, along with death and disease to the indigenous population. This moment appears in Hurricane Season’s opening chapter in passing: ‘those filthy Spaniards who, from their boats, took one look at all that land spread before them and said finders keepers, this land belongs to us and to the Kingdom of Castile; and the ancients, the few who were left had to run for the hills and they lost everything, right down to the stones of their temples, which ended up buried in the mountainside in the hurricane of ’78’. 

Despite the historical importance of Veracruz (the port city which also gives its name to the state) much well-known Mexican literature focuses on the capital Mexico City and the Northern borders with the US. The popular genre of ‘narcoliteratura’ tends to focus on the cartel kingpins but Melchor prefers to write about how ordinary people are affected by the violence. She said, ‘I found that not talking about narcos and sicarios directly, but of the conditions in which they emerge, or the way their presence is normalized, or how this situation is perceived by people from the southeast of Mexico (generally underrepresented in Mexican literature) could also help illustrate this reality.’ 

How was the book received? 

Hurricane Season has been translated into many languages and was met with enormous critical acclaim around the world. In Germany it won the Anna-Seghers-Preis and the International Literature Award in 2019. In the UK, it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. 

In the Observer, Anthony Cummings wrote: ‘Melchor’s long, snaking sentences make the book almost literally unputdownable, shifting our grasp of key events by continually creeping up on them from new angles. A formidable debut.’  

In the Guardian, M. John Harrison described Hurricane Season as ‘a mystery novel, but not one presented in any manner to which we’re accustomed; a horror novel, but only metaphorically; and a political novel with deep penetration of a remarkably foul milieu’. 

In the TLS, Louis Amis wrote: ‘Hughes elegantly brings out Melchor’s cruel humour, her textured depiction of backland squalor and flashes of hardcore poetry – along with the novel’s primary effect, which is that of a kind of sensory bludgeoning.’ 

The novel has been adapted for a film, directed by Elisa Miller, the first Mexican female director to win a Short Film Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for her short feature, Ver Llover (Watching It Rain), in 2016. Hurricane Season will be released on Netflix on November 1 2023.