all that grows: nature and writing is the English-language translation of Todo lo que crece: naturaleza y escritura by the Argentinian author Clara Obligado. The book chronicles the author's upbringing in Argentina, her exile to Spain, and her resulting reconciliation of place, memory, loss, and growth. Through botanical and natural metaphors as well as frank recollection of events, the book explores the passage of time across different hemispheres and dialects. As the author navigates shifts in landscape and language, her writing becomes a shelter and a form of time travel, mirroring the natural world's ability to invent and reinvent itself.
all that grows: nature and writing was originally published in Spanish by Páginas de Espuma in Spain in 2021.
This publication is part of X Artists' Books' X Topics (XT) series, a collection of books focused on the writing and ideas of marginalized voices.
Clara Obligado was born in Buenos Aires and has lived in Madrid since 1976, where she writes and teaches creative writing workshops. Her awards include the Lumen Prize for her novel La hija de Marx [Marx's Daughter] (1996), the Juan March Cencillo Short Novel Prize for Petrarca para viajeros [Petrarch for Travelers] (2015), and the Setenil Award for El libro de los viajes equivocados [The Book of Mistaken Journeys] (2011). Her essays Una casa lejos de casa: La escritura extranjera [A Home Far from Home: Foreign Writing] (2020) and Todo lo que crece: naturaleza y escritura [all that grows: nature and writing] (2021) have been republished multiple times. As an anthologist, she has ventured into microfiction with Por favor, sea breve [Please, Be Brief] (2009), and she coordinated the Atlas de Literatura Latinoamericana (arquitectura inestable) [Atlas of Latin American Literature (Unstable Architecture)] (2022). Her latest book is Tres maneras de decir adiós [Three Ways to Say Goodbye], published in March 2024. Obligado's work has been translated into several languages. She has never lost contact with her country of origin, where her work is published by various publishing houses.
"Writers are, as Hélène Cixous wrote, those 'who must paint with brushes all sticky with words.' Clara Obligado's all that grows is a shimmering autobiographical text in which she paints, with word-images, the two landscapes of her own experience—the before and after of her escape from Argentina to Spain, from south to north. In Sur, Obligado remembers her childhood and parents through images of the environment of the pampa where she grew up, the plants and birds, insects, trees and fruits found in gardens, fields, and in the wild. Obligado's life—and her writing—was shaped by part of her generation dying at the hands of a violent dictatorship and by her exile. all that grows portrays her life uprooted and transplanted to the Norte, Spain, and the many diasporas, sometimes violent, of the Spanish language itself—writing is itself a form of geolinguistics. Obligado shows us how she put down roots in literature and has lived through writing: where 'life goes on, it imposes itself, heaping up skeletons, animal and vegetal remains, memories.'" — Alexandra Grant, publisher and artist
