Silvana Paternostro is an award-winning journalist who has written extensively on Cuba and Central and South America. She specializes in women’s issues, and has also written comprehensively about AIDS, revolutionary movements, underground economies and the intersection of literature, music and other cultural forms with politics and economics.
She is the author of In the Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture, which explores gender roles and the effect of government and religion on women’s lives in Latin America, which was nominated for the PEN/Martha Abrams Award for First Nonfiction. Her exposé of re-virginization centers in the US appeared in the book Se Habla Español: Voces Latinas en USA, the first anthology of new Latino voices in the United States published in Spanish.
She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times , The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Financial Times and numerous other publications. Her work is frequently translated and re-printed, especially in Latin America. In 1999 she was selected by Time/CNN as one of 50 Latin American Leaders for the New Millennium.
Her second book, My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind, mixes memoir with history and reportage to tell the story of Colombia’s violence. It was published by Henry Holt in September 2007.
She was associate producer on Che: The Argentine and Che: Guerrilla, a two part movie based on the life of Che Guevara, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Benicio del Toro. The movie started shooting in July 2007 and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008.
In 2014, Paternostro’s oral history of Gabriel García Márquez, Soledad & Compañía, was published in Spanish. In 2017, Solitude & Company came out in English and has been widely translated.
In 2023, Paternostro’s In The Land of God and Man came out in a 20th anniversary edition in her native Colombia and is considered a pioneering work of women’s issues and narrative journalism.
Photo credit: Marcela García