Fruit of the Drunken Tree: Violence, Childhood and Escobar's Colombia

What this episode covers

How does a country live in peace when for generations, there has been no model for peace? How does growing up amidst violence and fear affect the way a child sees the world - and how might she come to feel about that country looking back as an adult in a wealthier country? These are questions that author Ingrid Rojas Contreras considers in her gripping debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree. Set in Colombia during the height of the Escobar cartel’s grip on Colombia, the novel tells the story of an unlikely friendship between two young girls growing up in a climate of political assassinations, kidnappings and car bombs. “You don’t need to have grown up in Bogotá to be taken in by Contreras’s simple but memorable prose and absorbing story line,” says The New York Times review of Contreras’s Impac-Dublin Literary Award-nominated book. Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree is an Indie Next selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She is the book columnist for KQED, the Bay Area's NPR affiliate. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco, and works with immigrant high school students as part of a San Francisco Arts Commission initiative bringing writers into public schools. She is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds. The host of this episode is Jael Richardson, the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson, a Father’s Life, a memoir based on her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey. The Stone Thrower was adapted into a children’s book in 2016 and was shortlisted for a Canadian picture book award. Richardson is a book columnist and guest host on CBC’s q. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Brampton, Ontario where she founded and serves as the Artistic Director for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD). Her debut novel, Gutter Child, is coming Fall 2020 with HarperCollins Canada.