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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
How to pronounce Elaine Castillo: cast-ILL-yo
Elaine Castillo, named one of "30 of the Planet's Most Exciting Young People" by the Financial Times, was born and raised in the Bay Area. Her debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, was a finalist for numerous prizes including the Elle Big Book Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize and was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, Real Simple, Lit Hub, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Public Library.
This bio was last updated on 07/28/2025. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
This novel is a beautiful example of how the personal is political, and that for many, politics can't be unraveled from intimate, everyday life. Did you set out to write a political book, or is it the nature of the narrative?
Yeah, I'm one of those cats that believes all art is political, even (or especially) the art that insists on political neutrality or claims to transcend politics altogether.
I've written a book that's in part about a former New People's Army rebel, a book about people who've survived the Marcos dictatorship, about queer immigrant women, so it's relatively easy to point and say: Such and such things are the political aspects of the book. But I don't really subscribe to that idea. The book is in part a portrait of a former Communist insurgent, and as such there are things in the book that fall in line with that genre we call political art: social history, reflections on power, discussion of geopolitical landscapes. But what I'm even more interested in is the textured, daily minutia of the years she lives out in the book's present as an exile in America. The things Hero experiences as a newcomer to the Bay Area—taking a cousin to school, cleaning a house, working at a restaurant, falling in love—...
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than fifty-five languages. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; Half of a Yellow Sun, ... (more)
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Frankie Barnet is the author of a story collection, An Indoor Kind of Girl, and the forthcoming graphic literary novel Kim: A Novel Idea, both from Metatron Press in Canada. Her fiction has been published in places such as ... (more)
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