John Manuel Arias Spotlights Three Costa Rican Writers as His New Novel Arrives from Bloomsbury
As Crocodilopolis reaches readers this week, author John Manuel Arias is highlighting three Costa Rican writers whose work he says helps define the country’s literary landscape: Yolanda Oreamuno, Eunice Odio and Quince Duncan. The selections range from a mid-20th-century feminist landmark to mythic poetry and foundational Afro-Caribbean fiction.
John Manuel Arias, whose novel Crocodilopolis is out this week from Bloomsbury, is drawing attention to three Costa Rican writers he considers essential reading. His choices point to a literary tradition that, like the country’s celebrated biodiversity, is varied, abundant and deeply rooted in place.
Costa Rica is often associated with forests, reefs and a landscape known for extraordinary natural richness, but its literary culture is equally vibrant. Longstanding publishers such as La Universidad de Costa Rica and La Editorial de Costa Rica continue to sustain that tradition, while San José’s National Book Festival brings readers and writers together each year on the final Saturday of August.
Yolanda Oreamuno
Arias begins with Yolanda Oreamuno, a writer remembered as well ahead of her era. Her reputation was tied not only to her presence and charisma, but also to a novel that confronted the forces shaping women’s lives in Costa Rica during the 1940s.
Her only novel, La ruta de su evasión, translated as Her Way Out, centers on a family trapped under the rule of a brutal patriarch. The book follows the father’s sons as they struggle against becoming like him, while their ill, bedridden mother faces the end of a loveless marriage. The novel has endured as a feminist milestone and has influenced generations of Costa Rican women.
Eunice Odio
Oreamuno died at 40 in Mexico City at the home of her close friend, the poet Eunice Odio, whose own work occupies a singular place in Costa Rican letters. Odio’s poetry is described as existing outside ordinary categories of time and style, with a voice at once expansive and inward-looking.
Her collection El tránsito del fuego, or The Fire’s Journey, is built as a four-part sequence that imagines a world remade through myth. Gods, destruction and elemental force animate the poems, giving the work a lasting intensity that has helped make it a cult favorite.
Quince Duncan
The third writer Arias highlights is Quince Duncan, who comes from the province of Limón in Costa Rica’s south and is recognized as the first Afro-Caribbean writer to publish in Spanish in the country. His work has been central to broadening the national literary canon.
Over the course of 50 years, Duncan has published 14 books, including Los cuatro espejos, translated as The Four Mirrors, and Las raíces vivientes, or Living Roots. Across that body of work, he has focused on Black characters and their experiences, especially those shaped by the culture and history of Limón.
Taken together, Arias’s picks show a Costa Rican literature defined by innovation, political force and cultural breadth. From Oreamuno’s critique of patriarchy to Odio’s mythic poetic vision and Duncan’s long contribution to Afro-Caribbean storytelling, the three writers offer a strong entry point for readers looking beyond the country’s beaches and rainforests and into its literary heritage.