Carolina de Robertis

Carolina de Robertis in 2019

Carolina de Robertis (born 1975) is a Uruguayan-American author and educator.

Quotes

• Writing can be a way of honoring those who’ve suffered real traumas and often surmounted them. And when a story has not yet been fully reflected in formal histories, the telling has a purpose, or so we hope…
  • On writing and history in “Interviews: Carolina de Robertis” in BookPage (2019 Sep 3)

• At some point, the novelist has to leap head first into the pool of imagination in order to more freely explore the truth.
  • On the work of a novelist in “Interviews: Carolina de Robertis” in BookPage (2019 Sep 3)

• As a Rioplatense person of European decent, I feel strongly about the urgency of retelling the stories of our nation’s histories, the Argentinian and Uruguayan national stories and cultural stories, in ways that fully recognize the presence of black people. Which is a huge part of the greater story of the Americas as well. You cannot tell the story of the Americas without the story of black people and the transatlantic slave trade — that mass atrocity. Alongside, of course, the genocide of indigenous people. And also the cultural richness and artistic production and stories of resilience and power that, too, come out of those harsh realities that are at the origin of the Americas.
  • On telling the histories of Uruguay and Argentina in "A Conversation with Carolina De Robertis on Immigration, Sexuality, and the True Origins of the Tango" in Los Angeles Review of Books (2016 Apr 20)

• We do our characters a disservice by allowing them to be flat. Our role as novelists is to do our best to portray the nuance of a whole range of life experiences. It's one of the things that fiction is uniquely positioned to do, to bring the reader into the interior life of people’s experiences that are wildly different than our own…
  • On creating rounded characters in “A Conversation with Carolina De Robertis on Immigration, Sexuality, and the True Origins of the Tango” in Los Angeles Review of Books (2016 Apr 20)