Episode description

EPISODE 318 - Paula Delgado-Kling - Leonor The Story of a Lost Childhood in Colombia

Our Guest: Paula Delgado-Kling holds degrees in comparative literature, French civilizations, international affairs, and creative writing from Brown, Columbia and the New School, respectively.

This is her first book. It has been excerpted in Narrative Magazine (Winter 2008 issue), The Literary Review (Winter 2009 issue and reprinted in the 60th anniversary issue, fall 2017), Pacifica Literary Review (Winter 2017 issue), The Grief Diaries (February 2017 issue), and translated into Japanese for happano.org (January 2017 issue).

For this book, she received two grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, and won the OneWorld Prize in nonfiction from the Pan African Literary Forum, for which she was awarded a trip to Accra, Ghana to share her work. Paula’s website is pauladelgadokling.com. Her reportage, “El Diario de Maher Arar,” was anthologized in Las Mejores Crónicas de Gatopardo (Random House Mondadori, 2006).

Since March 2005, she has been an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. She lives in New York.

The Book: Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood Paperback - Set in the author’s homeland, Colombia, this is the heartbreaking story of Leonor, former child soldier of the FARC, a rural guerrilla group.

Paula Delgado-Kling followed Leonor for nineteen years, from shortly after she was an active member of the FARC forced into sexual slavery by a commander thirty-four years her senior, through her rehabilitation and struggle with alcohol and drug addiction, to more recent days as the mother of two girls.

Leonor’s physical beauty, together with resourcefulness and imagination in the face of horrendous circumstances, helped her carve a space for herself in a male-dominated world. She never stopped believing that she was a woman of worth and importance. It took her many years of therapy to accept that she was also a victim.

Throughout the story of Leonor, Delgado-Kling interweaves the experiences of her own family, involved with Colombian politics since the 19th century and deeply afflicted, too, by the decades of violence there.

https://www.amazon.ca/Leonor-Story-Childhood-Paula-Delgado-Kling/dp/1682194477
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