When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold

A genre-bending feminist account of the lives and crimes of four women who committed the double transgression of murder, violating not only criminal law but also the invisible laws of gender.

When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold analyzes four homicides carried out by Chilean women over the course of the twentieth century. Drawing on her training as a lawyer, Alia Trabucco Zerán offers a nuanced close reading of their lives and crimes, foregoing sensationalism in order to dissect how all four were both perpetrators of violent acts and victims of another, more insidious kind of violence. This radical retelling challenges the archetype of the woman murderer and reveals another narrative, one as disturbing and provocative as the transgressions themselves: What makes women lash out against the restraints of gendered domesticity, and how do we—readers, viewers, the media, the art world, the political establishment—treat them when they do?

Expertly intertwining true crime, critical essay, and research diary, International Booker Prize finalist Alia Trabucco Zerán (The Remainder), in a translation by Sophie Hughes, brings an overdue feminist perspective to the study of deviant women.

Publication date: April 5, 2022

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5 x 7.75 

Page count: 256 pages

ISBN: 9781566896337

Translated from the Spanish

Alia Trabucco Zerán was born in Chile in 1983. She was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for a master’s in creative writing in Spanish at New York University, where she wrote her debut novel La resta (The Remainder). La resta won the prize for Best Unpublished Literary Work awarded by the Consejo Nacional del Libro de Chile, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International in 2019. It has been translated into seven languages. Las homicidas is her second book. She lives between Santiago and London.

Sophie Hughes is a British translator of Spanish-language writers such as Alia Trabucco Zerán, Fernanda Melchor, and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has been nominated three times for the International Booker Prize, as well as for the Dublin Literary Award, the Valle Inclán Translation Prize, the National Book Award in Translation, the PEN Translation Prize, the National Translation Award in Prose, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Winner of the 2022 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

A Book Riot 2022 Must-Read Book in Translation

“Using court records, newspaper articles and museum exhibits—which she punctuates with her own whip-smart diary entries—Trabucco Zerán reconstructs each crime scene, backdrop and all.”

—Tina Jordan, The New York Times

“Trabucco Zerán, well translated by Sophie Hughes, is a moving, imaginative writer. . . . [When Women Kill] applies a thoughtful feminist lens to stories as painful as they are gory.”

—Lily Meyer, NPR

“A timely and important work that invites the reader to reconsider the relationship between gender and violence—not just in Chile but globally.”

—Judges’ citation, British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding

“Formally inventive, lyrical, feminist.”

—Kirkus, starred review

“Weaving together multiple literary styles and a wide range of voices, When Women Kill constantly remolds and blends genres, culminating in an irresistibly compelling read.”

—Suhasini Patni, Asymptote Journal

“When Women Kill reveals how narratives and cultural systems work in the wake of women’s crimes.”

—Morgan Graham, Cleveland Review of Books

“[A work] that true crime buffs and fans of cultural history can appreciate in equal measure.”

—Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

“A fascinating must-read for all true crime fans, a book that I annotated, starred, dogeared, and just generally obsessed over. . . . Brilliant.”

—Leah Rachel von Essen, Book Riot

“A vital and beautifully written book. . . . Equal parts essay, detective story, diary, and feminist discourse.”

—Giuseppe Caputo

“A smart, rigorous, and necessary book.”

—Liliana Colanzi, El País

“This essay turns a stark gaze upon the condition of women in Chile in the last century.”

—Nona Fernández

“A masterful and pertinent account full of humanity and emotion.”

—Fernanda Melchor

“This brilliant essay paints a cogent and unsparing portrait of the rhetorical operations of the patriarchy.”

—Lina Meruane