Pola Oloixarac Books in Order

Pola Oloixarac is an Argentine novelist, journalist, translator, and librettist born in Buenos Aires in 1977. Her fiction brings together ideas that do not usually sit quietly beside one another: philosophy, sex, technology, politics, academic life, and the messy ways people try to understand one another.

She studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires. That background is present throughout her novels, not as a lecture, but in characters who argue, theorize, obsess, and use big ideas to explain their own bad decisions.

Oloixarac came to fiction alongside work in cultural and political journalism and editorial projects. She also helped found The Buenos Aires Review, a bilingual journal focused on contemporary writing from the Americas.

Her debut novel, Savage Theories, appeared in Spanish in 2008.

Set largely in Buenos Aires, Savage Theories follows the elusive Rosa Ostreech as she works on a thesis about violence and culture and becomes fixated on an older professor. The book moves through campus life, underground scenes, hacking, drugs, sex, and anthropology, while a separate thread reaches back to a Dutch researcher working in Africa in 1917. It is funny, uncomfortable, and full of characters trying to turn desire and chaos into a workable theory.

Then she widened the frame.

In Dark Constellations, first published in 2015, Oloixarac links nineteenth-century plant research, the early life of Argentine hacker Cassio, and a near-future DNA surveillance project. It is the place to go if you want the most openly speculative side of her work. The novel asks what happens when curiosity, data, and state power begin feeding one another, and it keeps the human cost in view.

Her 2019 novel Mona shifts to the international literary world. Mona, a Peruvian writer living in California, travels to Sweden after receiving a major prize nomination and finds herself trapped among rivals, awkward social rituals, and signs of unexplained violence. The book has plenty of sharp jokes about universities, publishing, identity, and literary status, but it also follows a woman whose past keeps pushing into the present.

Her English-language editions have introduced her work to readers through translations by Roy Kesey and Adam Morris. In 2010, she was named among Granta's Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists and took part in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She has also received support from Argentina's National Fund for the Arts and the 2021 Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer's Award, and she returned to Iowa as a visiting professor in 2023.

Outside the novels, Oloixarac has written political and cultural commentary and created the libretto for the opera Hercules in Mato Grosso. Across the work, readers can expect restless plots, dark humor, intellectual sparring, and people who discover that knowledge can be every bit as risky as ignorance.