Julian Zabalbeascoa in Person

A masterly crafted and haunting tale of survival, longing, and empathy, set during the Spanish Civil War.

In late 1936, eighteen-year-old Isidro Elejalde leaves his Basque village in Northern Spain, spurred to join the fight to preserve his country's democracy from the insurrectionists by the rousing words of a political essayist. Months earlier, Spanish generals launched a military coup to overthrow Spain's newly elected left-wing government. They assumed the population would welcome the coup, but throughout the country people like Isidro remained loyal to the ideals of democracy, and the Spanish Civil War began in bloody earnest.

In Bilbao, Mariana raises her two young children while, with her writing, she decries the fascist-backed coup attempt and their German and Italian allies, imploring the world to support democracy. As the Nationalist forces assault the country, Mariana and Isidro's lives intersect fleetingly, yet in meaningful and lasting ways.

Through a chorus of voices--a female soldier in an all-male battalion, a reluctant conscript recently emigrated from Cuba, a young girl whose parents have abandoned her in order to fight against the fascists, among others--we follow Isidro and Mariana as they struggle to maintain their humanity in a country determined to tear itself apart.

Julian Zabalbeascoa is a fierce and assured new talent, and What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a remarkable feat of research and imagination, as well as a transcendent literary accomplishment.

Julian Zabalbeascoa’s debut novel What We Tried to Bury Grows Here will be published this fall by Two Dollar Radio.

Among other journals, his stories have been published in American Short Fiction, Boulevard, The Common, Copper Nickel, Electric Literature, The Florida Review, The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, One Story, Ploughshares, Ploughshares Solos, and Shenandoah. His interviews and reviews have appeared in The Believer, Electric Literature, The Millions, and Salamander.

A dual citizen of Spain and the US, he was born and raised in California’s Central Valley. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing in Madrid from the University of New Orleans and taught at various institutions throughout California before moving to Boston, where he now teaches in the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He leads annual study abroad programs to Belfast, Donostia-San Sebastian, Havana, Madrid, Paris, and Seville.

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