Romancero Books celebrates its fifth anniversary with Alana S. Portero
ALANA S. PORTERO in conversation with Jorge Gárriz - BAD HABIT - paperback edition launch
Bad habit, written by Alana S. Portero, and translated by Mara Faye Lethem, published by Fourth Estate.
An unnamed young trans woman grows up in a working-class suburb that has no place for her. She discovers community and kinship in downtown Madrid, amid a dazzling party scene animated by charming junkies, glamorous pop divas, and fallen angels. With each step she takes forward in the city, she finds herself confronted by an antagonism she does not yet know how to counter. In this thrilling and yet often frightening place each decision can have the highest of stakes and yet she knows that only she can forge a path forward to the life she truly wants to live.
Beautiful and deeply moving, Bad Habit by Alana S Portero is translated by Mara Faye Lethem, and deftly illuminates the search for identity and the power of chosen family. Bad Habit is an unforgettable story of self-realisation that speaks to the outsider in all of us.
'A work of deep humility’GUARDIAN
‘An engulfing novel’ AVNI DOSHI
‘Believe the hype!' OKECHUKWU NZELU
‘A revelation … made me weep more than once’ SABA SAMS
‘Infused with camp humour, pathos and the spirit of resilience’ AMELIA ABRAHAMS
'Affecting and evocative' OBSERVER
'Painful yet unquestionably hopeful' NICOLA DINAN
‘Portero’s elegant storytelling catches a celestial light’ ELOGHOSA OSUNDE
‘Leaves you stunned’ TRAVIS ALABANZA
‘Obliges the reader to hold back (or unleash) their feelings chapter after chapter’VOGUE SPAIN
‘The most talked-about debut of the year’TIME OUT SPAIN
Alana S. Portero
Alana S. Portero trained as a medievalist at the Autonomous University of Madrid, the city where she resides and cultivates the word in several ways, including as a writer, playwright, poet, and theatre director. She is also one of the founders of the theatre company STRIGA, in which she has directed and acted. She works with several media outlets, among them Agente provocador, Eldiario.es, El Salto Diario, SModa, and Vogue. In her writings, she explores the present-day cultural scene, the contemporary forms of feminism, and LGTBI+ activism, with special emphasis on the experience of trans women, and always observing the factor of social class in her work.
Her first novel, La mala costumbre (Seix Barral, 2023 – forthcoming in English as Bad Habit, Harper Collins, 2024), about the life of a trans woman who grows up in the outskirts of Madrid in the 1980s, has become a literary phenomenon in Spain and is being translated into a dozen languages. The narrator describes the complex situations faced by this character as she tries to find her own space, first as a girl and adolescent and then as an adult in a compartmentalised society that is unwilling to recognise lives that do not conform to the norm.