Laia Jufresa grew up in the cloud forest of Veracruz and spent her adolescence in Paris. In 2001, she moved to Mexico City and discovered she didn’t know how to cross a street. She’s been writing fiction ever since. 

Her first novel, UMAMI, was widely translated, won a PEN Translates Award, was shortlisted for Best Translated Book Awards 2016 and won Best First Novel in Spanish 2016 at the Festival for first novels in Chambery, France. Her latest book VEINTE, VEINTIUNO was recently published in Spanish by Random House. The first chapter was the upper runner of the Krause Essay prize from the Nonfiction Writing program of the University of Iowa.

Laia has been named as one of the best young writers of Latin America (Bogotá39) and of Mexico (Mexico20). When in 2017 the Hay festival selected 30 young writers and thinkers who will help imagine and shape the world in the next 30 years, she was honoured to be one of them. Her fiction has appeared in Vogue, Words Without Borders, McSweeneys, Emergence Magazine. Her nonfiction in El País, Netflix and BBC radio. After living in seven different countries, Laia has settled in Edinburgh, Scotland.

She’s taught at the Creative Writing Program of the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana in Mexico City, The Centre for Fiction in New York and The International Literary Seminars in Kenya. Since 2020, Laia leads a thriving online community called Escribir es un lugar (“Writing is a place") where she’s already offered group coaching, creative writing workshops and on-going support to over a hundred female hispanic writers of all ages.

She is currently writing her second novel, WISHBONE.