Spotlight: Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood by Paula Delgado-Kling
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Release date: January 23, 2024
Publisher: OR Books
Genre: Adult Nonfiction
In Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood, Paula Delgado-Kling takes us to her homeland, Colombia, where she finds answers to the country’s drug wars by examining the life of Leonor, a former child soldier in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), once a deadly cocaine-trafficking group on the U.S. State Department’s terrorism list.
The author followed Leonor for nineteen years, from shortly after she was an active FARC member 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 mom of two girls.
Colombia’s violence also touched the author’s family. The idea for this nonfiction narrative began with the question: why was Paula Delgado-Kling’s brother kidnapped, and why were his guards teenagers?
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About the Author
Paula Delgado-Kling holds degrees in comparative literature/French civilizations, international affairs, and creative writing from Brown, Columbia, and the New School, respectively. Leonor, for which she received two grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts, is her first book. Excerpts of this book have appeared in Narrative, The Literary Review, Pacifica Literary Review, and Happano.org in Japan. Her work for the Mexican monthly news magazine Gatopardo was nominated for the Simon Bolivar Award, Colombia’s top journalism prize, and anthologized in Las Mejores Crónicas de Gatopardo (Random House Mondadori, 2006).
Connect:
Author website: http://pauladelgadokling.com
Twitter: @ColombiaTalk
Instagram: @pauladelgadokling
