Mónica Ojeda Franco (born 1988) is an Ecuadorian writer. Her work has been described as Andean Gothic, with an emphasis on familial relationships. She has published in several genres, including poetry, novels, and short stories. A native of Guayaquil, Ojeda obtained her bachelor's degree before moving to Spain for a master's in creative writing. She decided to emigrate from Ecuador permanently in 2017, a decision that informed her later writing.
Ojeda has been described as one of Ecuador's most important living writers.
Early life Ojeda was born in Guayaquil in 1988. Her mother held a degree in literature and taught at a university, while her father was also a teacher. Ojeda would read Reader's Digest books and classics like Madame Bovary and Death in Venice from her mother's library as a child. At age ten, her mother found something she wrote. The joy and recognition it brought inspired her to study literature herself. Her grandfather influenced her decision to continue writing. Suffering from dementia, he would mix real-life details with legends and myths. Ojeda decided at thirteen that she hoped to match the power of his storytelling.
Ojeda studied literature at the Universidad Católica de Santiago de Guayaquil before enrolling in a master's degree in creative writing in Barcelona. The Spanish publisher Candaya included one of her stories in an anthology of emerging Ibero-American writers in 2013. The next year, while still pursuing her master's degree, she won the 2014 Alba Narrativa Prize from the intergovernmental ALBA group for (The Silva Disfiguration). It tells of a group of students who invent the biography of Gianella Silva, a supposedly forgotten filmmaker who was part of the Tzantzismo movement in 1960s Ecuador. The book was published in Havana, Cuba, in 2015.
In 2017, at the age of 29, Ojeda emigrated from Ecuador to Spain. She has cited violence in her native Guayaquil and said that her literary work is "full of that violence, of those fears, but also of all that desire that makes up my historical-geographical experience with Ecuador". She spent three years in Spain without legal residency, describing the country's immigration process as difficult for Latin Americans.
Later career
Candaya published Ojeda's second novel, Nefando, in 2016. She later recalled that she started the novel in Guayaquil and completed it in Barcelona, where the quiet and isolation helped her write. She was selected for the 2017 Bogotá39, an initiative of the Hay Festival and UNESCO's World Book Capital program to recognize the best young writers in Latin America under 40 years old. She questioned what she saw as the award's criteria and said that only a small percentage of some countries' output reached the Spanish judges. The following year La Hora would call her one of Ecuador's most important living writers.
In January 2018, she published the novel Mandĺbula, which tells the story of two teenage girls obsessed with horror stories and creepypastas, one of whom is kidnapped by her literature teacher. It received favorable reviews and was described as "one of the novels of the season" by the Spanish newspaper El País, which ranked it 12th in its list of the 50 best books of 2018. The novel was also selected as one of the ten finalists for the Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Novel Prize in its 2018 edition. Its 2022 translation was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the United States.
In 2020 she was selected as one of five finalists for the sixth edition of the Ribera del Duero Short Story Award with her book of short stories Las voladoras, in which she explores through horror themes such as gender violence, abortion, sexuality and religion in a style she defined as "Andean gothic".
Style and themes
Ojeda's narrative is marked by the exploration of emotions associated with fear, pain, and perversity, particularly power dynamics and familial relationships. Her work is also characterized by its treatment of subjects considered taboo, including incest, child pornography, and the sexual awakening of minors.
Another recurring theme in her work is the relationship between the feminine and the monstrous. Ojeda has expressed an interest in female monsters from literature and Latin American folklore, from the Gorgons and Scylla of Greek mythology to Latin America's La Llorona, La Tunda, and La Patasola, and in reinterpreting them for a modern context.
Ojeda has been grouped with contemporary writers such as the Argentine Mariana Enríquez amid the contemporary rise of gothic fiction, influenced by violence and economic struggles in Latin American countries since the 1980s. The Guardian positioned Nefando as a departure from the magical realism with which Latin American literature has often been associated. Some critics describe this trend as a "New Latin American Gothic". Ojeda has herself used the term Andean gothic on social media and to promote literary events. In a 2026 article for Latin American Research Review, Luis Medina Cordova proposed "mangrove gothic" to describe Guayaquil's influence on Ojeda's Jawbone and María Fernanda Ampuero's Cockfight, emphasizing the importance of regional distinctions and the prevalence of mangrove trees in the coastal city.
Reception El País wrote that Ojeda "was greeted as one of the most powerful Latin American novelists today" with the publication of Nefando and that its use of the uncanny rose above genre conventions. Writing for Asymptote, María del Pilar Cuairán Chavarría described Ojeda as "one of the most renowned writers in Latin American literature right now". Her review of Sarah Booker's 2022 Jawbone translation praised the novel's depiction of topical issues like violence and misogyny while preserving its culturally specific language.
The rising popularity of Latin American women authors led El País to ask in 2017 whether a existed, referencing the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Ojeda rejects the term as an external label that reduces an entire continent to a single label. In a 2023 interview, Ojeda said she had been asked about the subject many times and stated, "We want to discover what is happening now, we want to connect with traditions that may not be those that have always been seen from the global north when thinking about Latin America. The view of Latin American literature from the global north is quite reductionist."
Personal life Ojeda identifies as spiritual but atheist. She has said that there are ways to approach religion beyond worship.
Works Novels La desfiguración Silva (2015) Nefando (2016). Translated in 2023 as Nefando by Sarah Booker. Mandíbula (2018). Translated by Sarah Booker in 2022 as Jawbone Chamanes eléctricos en la fiesta del sol (2024). Translated in 2026 as Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Sarah Booker.
Poetry El ciclo de las piedras (2015) Historia de la leche (2019)
Short stories Caninos (2017), individual story Las voladoras (2020)
See also Ecuadorian literature
References
Bibliography