Writing Helped Her Realize She Was a Woman. It Also Made Her Famous.
Before Camila Sosa Villada transitioned and stepped out into the world as a woman, she wrote as one.
Growing up in the province of Córdoba, in the Argentine interior, she inhabited a first-person, female voice in the stories that she wrote and kept secret from her parents. It was a powerful act of emancipation, she said, one laden with measures of shame and mischief, as if she were doing something forbidden.
“Writing enabled a certain courage,” Sosa Villada said in an interview from her home in Córdoba. “It was prophetic.”
Years later, that voice would be celebrated. Sosa Villada’s work has collected international prizes and accolades, often drawing on her own harsh experiences as a sex worker, an actress and a travesti — a term she and others in Latin America use to describe people who were assigned male at birth but develop a female identity, reclaiming the word from its origins as a slur.
Language has been an act of resistance for Sosa Villada.
“I don’t use the term trans women,” she wrote in an author’s note in her acclaimed debut novel, “Bad Girls.” “I don’t use surgical vocabulary, cold as a scalpel, because the terminology doesn’t reflect our experience as travestis in these regions, from Indigenous times to this nonsense of civilization. I reclaim the stonings and spittings, I reclaim the scorn.”
What she is after, she said, is a visceral reaction.
Her precise prose can be tender and blunt in turn, serving up doses of whimsical allegory alongside acts of intimate violence, and it has earned her a growing audience.
“Bad Girls,” translated by Kit Maude and published in English in 2022, tells the story of “a caravan of travestis” who do sex work in a Córdoba park. It won awards in Mexico, Spain and France, has been translated into 21 languages and is being adapted for the screen, with production and direction by the Oscar-winning Argentine filmmaker Armando Bó. It is scheduled to begin shooting in 2025.
Her following novel, “Tesis Sobre Una Domesticación,” scheduled for publication in English by Riverhead Books in spring 2026, is about an actress who had worked as a prostitute with an agency that offered “the best catalog of travesti escorts.” She marries a gay man and together they adopt a child.
The book has been adapted into a film slated for release later this year, starring Sosa Villada and co-produced by Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna’s company La Corriente del Golfo.
Her most recent book to be published in English is a collection of short stories, “I’m a Fool to Want You.” It was translated by Kit Maude, and released in May by Other Press.
Born in 1982, Sosa Villada comes from the western flank of the province of Córdoba, and her early years were shaped by a rough and rugged terrain that felt menacing at times, she said. She moved around a lot with her parents, roaming in search of work.
They often lived in ancient homes where there was no electricity, no potable water, no plumbing. But the sunsets, she said, “were endless.”
When she was around 10 years old, the family settled in Mina Clavero, a town of 18,000 ensconced in a valley. They built their house with their own hands. The towering mountains around them created the perception of an impenetrable wall, and as a child Sosa Villada would imagine the day when she could cross to the other side.
“There must be something else,” she recalled thinking. That desire was further fueled by the torment that she experienced when she began to venture out, at the age of 13 or 14, as a woman. She faced insults, was spat on and often had to run home in a hail of rocks, she said.
At first, her parents shunned her, she said. Her father warned her that she would end up dead in a ditch. (They’ve since reconciled.)
Sosa Villada eventually moved to the city of Córdoba at the age of 18 to study communication and theater. To pay her bills, she started working as a sex worker, and at times had terrifying encounters. In one, she said, she was suffocated by clients and robbed of what little she had.
That experience is described in a short story she describes as the most autobiographical she’s written. In it, parents go to a shrine to plead for help so their daughter can find a better job outside of sex work. Later, the daughter debuts in a play, and it becomes a smash hit.
The plot is drawn from experience, she said: Three months after her own parents’ visit to the shrine, Sosa Villada acted in a play in Córdoba that was co-authored by her and centered on her life. Its success helped launch her career.
Her identity and her work, she said, often left her feeling like a spy granted a window into worlds and facets that people otherwise kept hidden. She told the story of a former client, who in sexual encounters would ask her to act as if she were his daughter. Years later, she would see that man walking through the city, with his wife and children. That kind of access shaped her writing, she said.
“I’m not sure that it’s worth it, to be invisible in real life,” she said. “But in terms of language, in terms of literature and the word, it’s a privilege, because you get to see a certain human condition that doesn’t care to hide.”
Paola Lucantis, an Argentine editor who oversaw two of Sosa Villada’s books, said her writing “reveals certain wounds of humanity, of sociability, of sexuality, of love, of loneliness, which she manages to universalize through her experience.”
She added, “Camila is always looking a little further than the rest of us humans.”
Sandra Pareja, Sosa Villada’s agent, first heard of her writing through Argentine friends and recalled being moved by the range of her artistry. Despite her success, Pareja said it has been a challenge to ensure that Sosa Villada is not boxed in and that her complexity as a writer is respected.
International literary spaces are very exclusive, said Pareja, who recently accompanied Sosa Villada on a four-country book tour of Europe to promote “Tesis Sobre Una Domesticación.” “They only have mental space for maybe one Spanish-language writer” at a time, she said.
Sosa Villada, she said, has been able “to break so much ice” in that regard.
“The humanity and the compassion that her literature transmits,” she said, “allows her work to both connect to people in the community, and to people outside of the community. I think she really makes people feel something that they wouldn’t feel before, empathize in a way that they would never empathize before.”
Sosa Villada’s own experience playing the lead role in the upcoming film based on her book “Tesis Sobre Una Domesticación” opened a new world to her, she said.
That story, in which she plays a character based on herself, serves as a warning of what can happen if you lose yourself to success, she said, becoming “something that never gets tired of devouring.”
She relishes the writing process, she said, and credits her editors with enabling her prose to shine — “it’s better to have an editor than a boyfriend.” But she was never particularly interested in being published.
What she did, what she continues to do, she said, “it’s for me.”
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