Virago acquires Sosa Villada’s award-winning debut about trans sex workers

Virago has snapped up The Queens of Sarmiento Park, the prize-winning debut by Camila Sosa Villada first published in Argentina in 2019 with the title Las Malas.

Publishing director Anna Kelly acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Charlotte Seymour at Johnson & Alcock on behalf of The Other Press, which is publishing the book in May in the US as Bad Girls. The English translation is by Kit Maude. It will publish in the UK on 14th July.

The “singular debut novel” won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in Mexico, the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro in France and the Premio de Narrativa en Castellano in Spain. A TV series is in development with Oscar-winning "Birdman" co-screenwriter and filmmaker Armando Bó.

Sosa Villada is a writer, actress and singer and previously earned a living as a sex worker, street vendor and maid. Her novel is narrated by Camila, a young trans student who has moved from a small town to the city of Córdoba, and is earning money by selling sex. She begins to spend time at Auntie Encarna’s, “the queerest boarding house in the world”, where an eccentric group of trans sex workers give her refuge and solidarity, becoming like her family. 

The publisher continues: “One freezing evening when the group are out working in the park together, Auntie Encarna hears crying in the bushes and wades in to investigate. When she finds an abandoned baby boy, she will hear no arguments: she is bringing him home to care for him. Life for Camila and the others will never be the same again.” 

Kelly said: “This is a rich, complicated and unforgettable work of literature that has haunted me ever since I first read it. Passages of hard realism are interspersed with surreal, fantastical details—a character who slowly turns into a bird; men who wander around with no heads; the indomitable Auntie Encarna, who is 178 years old—to tell a wildly imaginative and original story about exclusion, yearning and love. 

“At times raw and painful, at times joyous and darkly funny, at times too sad to bear, this is a powerful and provocative novel that poses bold questions about gender, sexuality, the body and motherhood. I have read nothing else like it.”