Emerging Writers Series: Natalia Figueroa Barroso
Natalia Figueroa Barroso is a writer to watch. She first came to my attention through her powerful short stories, particularly this one, titled Back to the Red Earth, published in Griffith Review.
A writer of Uruguayan descent with Charrúa, Yoruba, and Iberian origins, her work is infused with her deep cultural roots and experiences of what it means to exist in the in-between of worlds and places and the complexity of home, family, and identity.
Her debut novel, Hailstones Fell Without Rain, was published via UQP and is a semi-autobiographical account of a fraught period of Uruguay’s history through the eyes of a family of women who experience and react to it in different ways.
We caught up on identity in creative work, paths of publication, and using personal lived experiences to fuel our creative work.
I always tend to start these interviews with an easy one – can you share a little about yourself and your background as a writer?
I’m a Latin American writer from Western Sydney. My family fled the Uruguayan civic-military dictatorship (1973–1985) in the mid-seventies. I was born in Cabramatta but moved back to our homeland when I was two, and I completed my early years of schooling in a barrio called Belvedere in Montevideo. When we returned to Western Sydney in the nineties, I became a selective mute as a form of protest against my parents for relocating me and my life — I wanted to go back home, to Uruguay.
It was during this period of physiological silence, but constant internal dialogue, that I began writing in a diary given to me by my Year Two teacher, Mrs Savage. I haven’t stopped writing since. But it wasn’t until 2018 — when I submitted a poem to Sweatshop Literacy Movement, which later became my first published short story Abuela’s Mark — that my writing career truly began.
Huge congratulations on Hailstones Fell Without Rain being published. It’s a truly powerful book, and I took a lot away from it. Can you tell us a little about the seed that first compelled you to begin writing this story?
Gracias. When I write, I usually picture one person I’m speaking to. For Hailstones Fell Without Rain, that person was Amelia Sanjurjo Casal. She was 41 and pregnant with her first child when she was detained on 2 November 1977 by the Uruguayan military. She was part of the Communist Party and a militant against the dictatorship. Because of her activism, she was “disappeared” — a euphemism for being murdered by the state.
Her remains were only found in June 2023 at Battalion 14 in Toledo, and confirmed to be hers in May 2024. I wrote this novel for her — and for the bones still buried, still waiting for their stories to be told.
The story moves fluidly across time and place, from Western Sydney to Uruguay and back again. How did you navigate that shift between geographies and generations? What were the challenges or joys of holding both places in the same narrative?
To connect the storylines, I leaned into a few literary techniques — especially parallelism — to create rhythm and flow between different timelines and places by reflecting settings, Fairfield in Western Sydney and El Cerro in Western Montevideo. Both are working-class suburbs, both lie west of their capital cities, and both are often stereotyped or stigmatised by the media. That mirroring helped blur the imagined borders between time and place.
But it was when I landed on the title Hailstones Fell Without Rain that everything clicked. It’s a poetic translation of the Uruguayan idiom cayó piedra sin llover, which we use when something or someone shows up unexpectedly and you’d rather they hadn’t. Like a knock at the door you don’t want to answer. Once I had the title, I knew each character needed to experience one of those moments, a cayó piedra sin llover, something that would shake their world and worldview. The title became more than a name, it became a poetic and structural device holding the novel together.
And experimenting with literary techniques is both a challenge and a joy. They’re tools we use to bring the story to life but they’re also tricky, often time-consuming, and not always easy to master. Still, that’s part of the play, the push and pull of crafting narrative.
The novel explores the aftershocks of political trauma, migration, and intergenerational memory through the voices of three women in one family. How did you approach weaving their voices together, especially when each carries distinct histories?
I grounded the novel in a strong thematic core — women, love and forgiveness, motherhood, state violence, migration, class, colonialism — and how all these shape each character’s identity. These shared themes made the various characters connect and communicate with one another.
But to keep their voices distinct, I used specific speech markers. For example, Graciela’s English is broken, so I applied Spanish phonotactics to her English. Since Spanish generally doesn’t start words with two consonants, I added a vowel at the beginning, so, “stop” became “estop”, “school” became “eschool”, and “street” became “estreet”. Staying consistent with that gave Graciela a recognisable voice, even without attribution attached to her dialogue.
There’s a strong undercurrent of what it means to remember and to be remembered. What does remembrance mean to you, especially as someone navigating both birthland and homeland?
I’m a product of colonisation and migration. Everything I write comes from that place. The memory of colonial violence endured by my Afro-Indigenous ancestors, and the state violence my family experienced during the dictatorship, shapes my worldview and therefore, my storytelling.
Writers aren’t unbiased blank pages; we don’t create from nothing. We’re full of somethings and those somethings always find their way into the narrative. They colour how we see the world. Acknowledging this — and being conscious of it — is how I rewrite the history that was erased by the colonial pen.
Can you share a bit about your road to publication? Were there turning points or key moments that helped bring this book into the world?
I’ve been part of Sweatshop Literacy Movement since 2018, where I learnt the craft of creative writing. Through that mentorship, I found literary casas for over twenty pieces published in journals, anthologies, and magazines.
In 2022, I drafted a short story called Back to the Red Earth, which was picked up by Griffith Review in 2023. After reading it, el Mohammed — aka Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad — told me, “I have very little doubt that you can go all the way with your writing.” He didn’t just say it, he backed it up. He pushed me (in the best way) to finish my manuscript and checked in regularly. When it was ready, I asked Mohammed to send it to my dream publisher, Aviva Tuffield at UQP. To my shock and joy, she accepted it within two weeks. It felt surreal. It reminded me that sometimes, la primera casa you knock on opens its doors.
Your prose is layered, lyrical and often sharply observant. What influences, literary or otherwise, shaped your voice? Are there writers or traditions you feel yourself writing alongside or in conversation with?
My number one influence is Elizabeth Acevedo. She was the first writer I read who spoke from the working-class Latinx diaspora, writing authentically in Spanglish. Reading her is always a mi casa es tu casa moment. Her work is what I turn to when I’m stuck, I might watch her recite Rat Ode on YouTube, rewatch her TEDx Talk I Use My Poetry to Confront the Violence Against Women, or re-read Family Lore.
When my imagination converses and converges with hers, I feel alive, awake, anew. She always pulls me out of writer’s block because even though we’re worlds apart, our worlds are a part of the same working-class Latinx women diaspora.
What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to emerging writers, especially those writing from diasporic or working-class perspectives, who are trying to tell their stories?
Find a writer from your diaspora you admire whom also holds your intersectional identities and read them. Then read them again and again and again. Next find a moment in your memory that speaks back to their work and write one paragraph a day. And edit, edit, edit until you know there’s an authentic conversation happening between your characters and theirs.
And lastly, now that Hailstones Fell Without Rain is out in the world, what’s next? Are there new ideas or stories calling to you?
¡Sí! I’m currently working on two projects.
The first is a poetry collection titled Holding My Mothers By Their Tongues, which explores colonisation and migration through the lens of language, how it’s held, broken, inherited, and reshaped across generations.
The second is a semi-autobiographical novel in the works, with the working title To Drink Perfume and Eat Gardenias. It’s inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, by my maternal grandmother Alba Benavides Laborde’s deep love of literature, and by my paternal grandmother Gladys Ferreira Figueroa’s journey with Alzheimer’s, where, in the absence of words, physical response became her love language. It’s a story of love — a tender, surreal kind — between death and dementia.
Natalia Figueroa Barroso is a writer of Uruguayan descent with Charrúa, Yoruba and Iberian origins. She was born on Dharug Ngura, and was raised between her birthland and her homeland. She is a member of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and has degrees in communications, screenwriting and media production from UTS. Her essays, poems and short stories have been published widely, including in Sweatshop Women: Volume One, Between Two Worlds, Meanjin, Red Room Poetry, Povo, Overland and Griffith Review. Hailstones Fell without Rain is her debut work of fiction.
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
