In our Spotlight On series, we chat with a member of the Writing NSW community to celebrate their success and learn more about their writing practice. This month we chat with author Alejandra Martinez.

Congratulations on the recent publication of Salsa in the Suburbs. How does it feel to publish your first book?

This is a dream come true. I have been working towards this for a long time. I now feel all the hard work and persistence has paid off.

Can you describe the journey Salsa in the Suburbs took, from idea to publication?

This was an incredibly long and difficult journey both for personal and professional reasons. The idea was born many years ago, when a friend’s mother died and her father, in his late sixties, surprisingly started dating. I wanted to explore this further and see what it would mean for a family from a culturally and linguistically diverse background to see their older father dating.

Opportunities for publication for writers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds are limited, particularly if you are not part of a writing community. I think this has improved now to when I first started seeking publication. This is partly why this book took so long to be published. I think class plays a role in this too. When you come from a working-class background you haven’t had access to a range of economic, social, and cultural opportunities that can enable the possibility of writing a book and having it published.

Winning the Newcastle Writers Festival Fresh Ink prize made a huge difference as it opened doors into the writing world. It gave me the confidence to finish the book and send it out to publishers.

I’m proud to stay Salsa in the Suburbs is the first novel by an Australian-Uruguayan writer.

Your book explores issues of Latinx communities in Australia, from a Uruguayan point of view. What binds the Latinx experience together regardless of the culture of origin?

The Latin-American community in Australia is diverse but many share that sense of unity, particularly for those of us who left countries due to dictatorships. The experience of leaving your homeland, for many not by choice, is what binds us together. The shared spaces that have been created too. One the best examples of this was La Peña, the cultural centre, in Newtown, where community gathered to celebrate, commemorate, and do solidarity work. It was a welcoming place for people of all backgrounds to share in our cultural backgrounds.

How does the Uruguay of today impact the Uruguay of yesterday from your character’s points of view?

My characters are largely stuck in the Uruguay of yesterday. The nostalgia held by the parents, Juan, and Carmen, has been passed down to the daughters. Lola clings to it and Betty rejects it. The daughters have not had their own adult experience of Uruguay, they have inherited their parent’s one, belonging to a different generation and different time. They need to reconcile what their Uruguayan heritage means as adults living in Australia.

When you write about food in your work, are you more interested in its preparation or the eating of it?

Both, however, the preparation of certain meals is a ritual in Uruguay. Asado, the beef ribs take a long time. I remember my father, on weekends in our backyard, preparing the barbeque and waiting to the heat was just right before he placed the meat on and brushing chimichurri on it.

My mother would make torta fritas, particularly when it rained as that is the tradition. These are big, flat round fried pastries, with a hole in the centre. It took time to prepare. She used to make them with lard and fry them in lard as that was how they were originally made. We would all gather around to eat them and drink mate.

In writing the preparation of food can show aspects of a culture as well as attributes of  the characters.

Lola has an anxiety disorder. You’ve been open about your own experience of anxiety. How difficult was it to write about that Lola’s experience?

I feel the stigma of mental health is not as bad as it was when I was first diagnosed and that made it easier to write about. It’s important to include characters with mental illness in literature, particularly now that mental illness has increased in society, and we need to continue to address stigma.  While it was challenging to write, it was also necessary. I also wanted to show that people don’t necessarily recover from mental illness, rather they learn to manage it. Yes, they recover from an episode, but like a chronic illness it’s there, sometimes faint, and other times all consuming.

What did the daughters expect their father to do, in terms of possible relationships, and why did he choose to act differently?

The daughters expected their father to find a Latin-American woman for companionship. They had not processed that their father might actually have a relationship. They imagined he would meet someone to go out to movies, or coffee, or drives with.

Juan didn’t consciously choose to act differently, it just happened. He didn’t expect to fall in love, but he welcomed it when it surprisingly happened. He was taken aback that he could feel that good again, it was something he never expected to feel again.

What comes next, what are you writing now?

For now, I’m continuing to promote the book and hopefully in the future there will more novels.

Alejandra Martinez is an Australian-Uruguayan writer. Her stories have been published in a range of anthologies and magazines, including Best Australian Stories (Black Inc), Girls Talk and Puentes Review.

Her writing explores migration, diversity and universal themes of identity, loss, ageing, mental health, and resilience. She was the winner of the 2022 Newcastle Writers Festival Fresh Ink Emerging Writer Prize. Her debut novel, Salsa in the Suburbs, was published in May 2025 by Puncher and Wattmann and is the first mainstream novel by an Australian-Uruguayan author.

Learn more about Alejandra, or follow her on Instagram.

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