Malva: The unknown story of Pablo Neruda’s only child, told from the afterlife

Winner of the Fintro Prize for Literature
Cleverly unravels the myth surrounding Neruda without knocking him off his pedestal, written in sparkling language. - JAN Hagar Peeters, a prize-winning Dutch poet, gives voice to Pablo Neruda’s only daughter, Malva, who was terminally ill and abandoned to foster parents in Holland, where she died at the age of eight during WWII. Malva tries to discover how Neruda, the flawless hero of the downtrodden, could deny her existence and how his many biographers could write her and her mother out of history. Only in death can she share her story through her chosen ghostwriter, Peeters, whose own father was a journalist in Chile when Neruda died. Witty and profound, Malva is a journey backward through history and the Chilean coup, seeing Neruda’s mysterious death and the moments that defined him through his daughter’s eyes. In her omniscient perspective, Malva is accompanied by other forgotten children-including Daniel Miller; Eduard Einstein; and Lucia, the schizophrenic daughter of James Joyce-as she tells her biographer of her small but not insignificant life. Malva transports readers from South America and Civil War Spain to worlds of grace and beauty.
Hagar Peeters (b. 1972) has published several volumes of poetry: Enough Poems Written About Love Today (1999), Suitcases of Sea Air (2003), Runner of Light (2008) and

Maturity

(2011). She has won awards including the J.C. Bloem Poetry Prize, the Jo Peters Poetry Prize and the Poetry Day Prize, and was shortlisted for Dutch Poet Laureate.