Blood of the Dawn

Blood of the Dawn follows three women whose lives intertwine and are ripped apart during what's known as "the time of fear" in Peruvian history when the Shining Path militant insurgency was at its peak. The novel rewrites the conflict through the voice of women, activating memory through a mixture of politics, desire, and pain in a lucid and brutal prose.

"Composed of very brief and stylistically varied sections — confession, interrogation, fever dream, prose poem — Blood of the Dawn rapidly switches between narratives, creating a sort of social collage." The Nation

"Blood of the Dawn is a delirious, harrowing onslaught of mixed allegiances and betrayals, punctuated with machete chops and the machine gun's staccato call." The Habitat

"Among the best books of the year . . . Her use of short paragraphs, quotes, photography, testimony and the different voices, turn this death tale into a recovery of the women's experience. Women are the ones who star in this sum of voices like a tragic chorus." Julio Ortega, El Boomeran

"With this courageous and necessary novel, Salazar Jiménez refuses to let the stories of the victims of 'the time of fear' get away. The violence that permeated Peru in the 1980s and 1990s is unspeakable, which is exactly why it needs to be spoken. That's what Salazar Jiménez does in this beautiful, horrifying work of art." NPR Books

Claudia Salazar Jiménez was born in Lima, Peru, in 1976. Currently based in New York, she studied Literature in the National University of San Marcos and has a PHD in Literature from NYU. Salazar Jiménez is a literary critic, cultural manager, and the founder and director of PERUFEST, the first Peruvian cinema festival in New York. Her short stories have appeared in several online publications and in international anthologies, and her debut novel, Blood of the Dawn, was awarded the Americas Narrative Prize in 2014.

Elizabeth Bryer is a translator and writer from Australia. Her translations have previously appeared in Words without Borders and Overland Literary Journal, and her writing about translation has been published in Sydney Review of Books. In 2016 she curated an edition of Seizure Online, which she dedicated to translated fiction and poetry. Her creative writing has been widely anthologized in publications including The Lifted Brow, Meanjin and Best Australian Science Writing.