Isabel del Rio

Isabel del Rio is a British-Spanish writer and linguist. She was born in Madrid and has lived in London for most of her life. Being bilingual, Isabel writes and publishes fiction and poetry in both English and Spanish. Known as Isabel del Río or Isabel del Río Salvador, Isabel’s surname originally includes an accented ‘í’, but she uses del Rio in her writing in English. She is also a literary translator, mainly of poetry, and some of her work involves self-translation and self-versioning. 

She first arrived in London at the age of seven and returned to Madrid to finish secondary school and university. In 1978 she came back to London to work full-time for the BBC World Service (Spanish Section) in Bush House, where she wrote and produced programmes on political and cultural issues, and she was the editor and presenter for the weekly Arts programme (Artes y Letras). For over two decades, she also worked as a full-time translator and terminologist for a United Nations agency in London (International Maritime Organization). 

Isabel’s fiction includes La duda, published by Tusquets Editores in 1995 (‘Colección Andanzas’) and short-listed for the awards ‘Nuevos Narradores’ and ‘Ícaro’. The book is a metalinguistic exercise with 14 short stories about how to write a collection of short fiction. She is fundamentally a short story writer and, as well as La duda, she has published the short-story collections Paradise & Hell and Una muerte incidental. Isabel has also published two dystopian novels, El tiempo que falta and Dissent. 

As a linguist, Isabel writes about language in many of her stories (as in El diccionario and La pesadilla del dinero) and in her poetry. Additionally, she has written several bilingual works. Her experimental book Zero Negative-Cero negative was published in 2011 by Araña Editorial and includes two different versions of each of the 18 stories, one in English and the other in Spanish, with diverse plotlines, characters and endings, and with both texts complementing and completing each other. She recently published Cuaderno de notas, a poetry collection with poems in either English, Spanish or both languages. 

Isabel’s autobiography, A Woman Alone: Fragments of a Memoir, is written in English with passages and quotes in Spanish. It tells the fragmented story of a life lived between two languages and two cultures. With the spectre of the Spanish Civil War hovering over many of the recollections in the book, the memoir describes the journey from a chequered past in a fascist dictatorship to a hopeful if challenging future where the protagonist affirms her identity both as a woman and as a writer. The text opens as follows: 

In the beginning was a whole sentence. And the sentence was: 'And now we’ll try for a boy!'  Yes, that is what they said when I was born: '¡Y ahora iremos a por el niño!' Luckily for them, a boy followed eighteen months later.

Isabel’s first poetry book in Spanish was Ciudad del interior, with many of her poems written from 1975 to 1993. Her poetry collections include Punto de fuga, about her brief professional stint in New York, Madrid Madrid Madrid (with stories, poems, songs, and recollections), Dolorem Ipsum (dedicated to the victims of the 2019 pandemic) and Ataraxy (a collection of sonnets). Isabel’s poems are mostly performance poetry, to be recited in front of an audience; she has a long experience in poetry readings and events and in the Spoken Word circuits.

Her most recent literary translation into English is an anthology of 16 Latin American poets living in the UK, Voces equidistantes. And her most recent book is La autora del fin del mundo, an anthology of her short stories from the past three decades, including stories originally written in Spanish and her translated versions of stories originally written in English. 

The plight of women is one of Isabel’s main subjects. Her short stories include: A very cold case, about the ritual killing of a woman in the Stone Age; Sepharad, about a woman sentenced to death by the Inquisition; Golden Gate Bridge, about a woman’s self-immolation; Cómo cometer un asesinato sin tener que mover un dedo, Two Counts of Rape and Cómplices about sexual and physical abuse against women; Android on female sexuality; and Una muerte incidental, El tapiz and Damnation on the oppression and exploitation of women.

Isabel has a 5-year Licenciatura (EQF Level 7) from the Complutense University Madrid (UCM) and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of West London (UWL) for her thesis on Translation and Adaptation, and a speculative novel as literary artefact. 

Compiled by Isabel del Rio (London)