Requiem with Yellow Butterflies

Overview

An Australian writer and a Mexican scientist fall in love reading great Latin American books aloud. But it takes a decade of journeys across the region, together and apart, for them to learn to read each other. Requiem with Yellow Butterflies is a love story and travel memoir that unfolds against the turbulent backdrop of Latin America in the 2000s. It takes us on a 1200-kilometre question-mark shaped loop through the newly socialist republics of the "pink tide," to a requiem mass for Mexico's disappeared and eventually back to Australia. Through evocative, unexpected pairings of southern hemisphere places and authors—Jose María Arguedas's Andes and Judith Wright's Cooloola coast, the Argentine pampa and the central Queensland brigalow country—the book explores distinct but parallel postcolonial literary traditions, the disordering state of love and the strangeness of coming home.

Author Biography

James Halford is a Brisbane writer who has spent extended periods in Latin America and often writes about the region. His fiction, creative nonfiction and criticism have been published in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin and Sydney Review of Books. He holds a literature degree and a creative doctorate from the University of Queensland, where he now teaches, and has studied Spanish in Argentina, Mexico and Spain.