Irma and Karen chat about the year ahead, and dive into their first Book Chat of the year, championing Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, and Colony by Annika Norlin.

Then Karen talks to Colombian writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras about how she coped with all the international attention after being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, how the violence of the Pablo Escobar era stimulated her curiosity as a writer, caring for yourself when writing from trauma, how she uses inherited stories and hauntings in her work, how she involved her family in fictionalising her childhood, how she hid microphones to collect her mother’s stories, using dreams in fiction, and why losing her memory was the best thing that’s ever happened to her.

(Karen met Ingrid at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2025)

About Ingrid

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir,
 The Man Who Could Move Clouds won the California Book Award and was a
finalist in multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Her debut novel was Fruit of the Drunken Tree, and her essays and short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines. She lives in California.