Valeria Luiselli on the Sound of the Border

photo: Ronan McKenzie

“Every time the tide would retreat, the dog would run toward the sea and in his anxiousness dig a hole between bollards of the wall. It was an animal’s desperation with the wall. What would explain this animal’s desperation?”

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essays Tell Me How It Ends and Sidewalks; the sonic essay Echoes From the Borderlands; and the novels Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, Lost Children Archive, and Beginning Middle End.  She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of DUBLIN Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award,  and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize.