Alice Albinia (KCL) - 2024-25 Students
alice.albinia@kcl.ac.uk

Guano o Huano: a novel of two hemispheres

My proposed novel uses fictional and non-fictional forms to examine the history and effects of the mining of Peruvian guano and Chilean saltpetre by British merchants who gained the Latin American monopolies in these fertilizers and made their fortune. The fiction will intertwine twenty-first century science and life-writing with nineteenth-century historical human voices – Latin American Spanish-descendent, indigenous Andean, and British – but also, crucially, more-than-human voices in both the global south and north. In so-doing the project will trace journeys through time and space, of plants and people, elements and artefacts, languages and genes.

Primary supervisor: Mr Edmund Gordon