In 2023, Madeline Jones, a senior editor at Algonquin, was at the Barcelona bookstore La Central when she spied an intriguing book on a table display: Volver a cuándo, the second novel by Venezuelan writer María Elena Morán, recently published by the Madrid-based Siruela. She was drawn to the sticker on its cover, denoting that it had won the Café Gijón Prize, one of Spain’s top literary awards, as well as the blurb from the esteemed Colombian writer Pilar Quintana.

As an editor, Jones had been looking for books about the ongoing crisis in Venezuela, particularly fiction. She picked up Morán’s novel—a story of mothers, daughters, and migration, set against the stark backdrop of the country’s economic collapse—and was immediately captured by its polyphonic narration.

Jones wrote to Morán to express her admiration and ask if there were plans to publish the book in English. Morán connected her with Casanovas & Lynch, the Barcelona-based agency which represents the author, and which Jones had worked with on many projects as an editor. Jones learned that no translator was attached to Volver a cuándo, so it hadn’t been submitted internationally.

That’s when Jones went out on a bit of a limb. It just so happened that the reason she was in Barcelona in the first place was to pursue a master’s degree in translation studies at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Though she conceded she was somewhat untested, she offered to translate a sample of the book so that the agency could go out with it. The agency agreed.

With the completed sample in hand, Jones and María Juncosa, a foreign rights manager at Casanovas & Lynch and a friend of Jones’s, teamed up to devise a submission list.

“It was a very cool experience, because as an editor I was sort or seeing the other side, the agent side,” Jones tells PW. “We both were like, ‘Oh, we’re spying for the other side of the business,’ as we’re doing this.”

On the submission list was Todd Portnowitz, a senior editor at Knopf and literary translator himself. Portnowitz and Jones had first met nine years earlier, at the inaugural Bread Loaf Translator’s Conference in Vermont, and not long after that both started their careers as book editors. When he received the submission from Casanovas & Lynch in early 2024, he was intrigued to see that Jones was the translator.

“That immediately piqued my interest,” Portnowitz says, “because at that point I knew she had a great eye not only as a translator but as an acquiring editor. Then I simply fell in love with the sample pages—the opening chapters of the book—and knew I wanted to publish it at Knopf. ”

“He just really got it,” Jones recalls, “and right away was interested.” After a call with Jones and Juncosa, Portnowitz preempted the book.

Published last month by Knopf, The Winds of Maracaibo marks not only Jones’s first book-length translation, but also Morán’s English-language debut.

“For this story to be coming out in English, particularly at this moment, feels more timely than we could have expected,” Jones says, referring to the recent upheaval in Venezuela, including the United States’ military strike on the country earlier this year.

Morán, who is now based in Brazil, says she hopes the novel connects with Latino readers in the U.S., who might “recognize something of themselves” in the story. But she also hopes it “reaches far beyond that community,” and challenges assumptions about her homeland.

“For a long time, both inside and outside Venezuela, the country's history has often been reduced to simplified narratives and easy answers,” Morán says. With the The Winds of Maracaibo, one of her aims is to “invite readers to embrace complexity.”

Portnowitz thinks the book manages to do just that. “My hope for The Winds of Maracaibo,” he says, “is that it will explode those generalizations about the migrant crisis, by expressing the humanity behind the headlines.”

Books from Venezuela can be hard to come by in the U.S., to the detriment of the literary landscape. Morán, for one, would love to see more English translations of Venezuelan writers Ana Teresa Torres and Victoria de Stefano, both of whom, she thinks, “would deeply resonate with both American readers and critics.”

Both Jones and Portnowitz acknowledged that it can sometimes be an uphill battle to acquire and publish books in translation. But Portnowitz has sensed a promising shift in last decade.

“Since those days in 2015 when I first met Maddie, I've felt readers' appetite for literature in translation steadily growing,” he says. “It's our job as publishers to meet that appetite with ambitious books and give them the attention they deserve.”