Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood
Alumni, 2006 - Creative Writing at The New School
Or Books, 2024
“The contrasts between Delgado-Kling’s and Leonor’s lives are stark, but the author’s capacity to bridge that distance both indicates her ambition as a writer and serves as a reminder of the utter pervasiveness of trauma.”
—EMILY NEMENS, author of The Cactus League
Set in the author’s homeland, Colombia, this is the heartbreaking story of Leonor, former child soldier of the FARC, a rural guerrilla group. Paula Delgado-Kling followed Leonor for nineteen years, from shortly after she was an active member of the FARC forced into sexual slavery by a commander thirty-four years her senior, through her rehabilitation and struggle with alcohol and drug addiction, to more recent days as the mother of two girls. Leonor’s physical beauty, together with resourcefulness and imagination in the face of horrendous circumstances, helped her carve a space for herself in a male-dominated world. She never stopped believing that she was a woman of worth and importance. It took her many years of therapy to accept that she was also a victim. Throughout the story of Leonor, Delgado-Kling interweaves the experiences of her own family, involved with Colombian politics since the 19th century and deeply afflicted, too, by the decades of violence there.