Backstory Talks: Anna Pazos
Details
Backstory is delighted to host the launch of Anna Pazos’s debut book Killing the Nerve, a striking work of autofiction and reportage newly translated into English by Laura McGloughlin and Charlotte Coombe, and published by Foundry Editions.
This special evening is an opportunity to meet a contemporary local author, hear about the translation process, and dive into the ideas behind the book. The event will include a conversation between Anna Pazos and writer/journalist Aaron Shulman, followed by a Q&A with the audience.
### About Killing the Nerve
In this tour de force of auto-journalism, Anna Pazos explores the end of youth and the beginning of adulthood for the global nomad generation. Readers journey with her from the “Mediterranean mediocrity” of bourgeois Barcelona life, through unstructured Erasmus days in Thessaloniki, first steps in journalism in Jerusalem, a transatlantic crossing with an unsuitable lover, and post-MeToo, pre-pandemic New York.
Back in Barcelona in 2021, she turns her sharp lens toward family, Catalan society after 2017, and her own place within it.Longlisted for the Premi Finestres 2023 and voted Best Catalan Book of the Year by El País, Killing the Nerve is a vibrant portrait of millennial life in Southern Europe.
### About the Author
Anna Pazos is a writer and documentary filmmaker. She has produced several short documentaries and non-fiction podcasts, and has written for El País, La Vanguardia, Jacobin, and Le Monde Diplomatique. Between 2014 and 2015 she lived in Jerusalem, contributing to outlets such as Ha’aretz and The Jerusalem Post. In 2017 she received a Fulbright scholarship to pursue postgraduate studies at NYU, later working as a fact-checker for the New York Times Syndicate and as an editor/producer at the BBC.
### About the Speaker
Aaron Shulman is a writer and journalist based in Barcelona. He is the author of The Age of Disenchantments: The Epic Story of Spain’s Most Notorious Literary Family and the Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War (Ecco/HarperCollins). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The American Scholar, among other outlets.