Batis Books is proud to announce the May 2027 publication of Mariano Melgar: Poems of Love and Rebellion, the first translation into English of poems by the Peruvian national poet and independence hero, translated by Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee and Spanish Granta co-founder Valerie Miles.

Batis Books will publish the title in a bilingual Spanish-English edition in South Africa and the United Kingdom. The book will also be distributed to retail in the Republic of Ireland, Namibia and Botswana.

Relatively unknown even in the wider Spanish world, the name of Mariano Melgar (1790–1815) is famous in Peru, especially for a poet who lived only into his twenties. Two centuries after being executed for his part in an anti-colonial uprising, Melgar now gives his name to streets, schools, an airport, a stadium, a municipality and even a professional football team. While much of his life remains shrouded in myth, his poems – especially his yaravís, which folded Quechua and Aymara tradition into Spanish verse – are still sung today.

In this selection from and translation of Melgar’s work, Coetzee and Miles demystify the gifted, spirited and famously lovelorn poet. Each translator contributes an essay on Melgar, as well as notes on their collaboration.

Coetzee writes: “The star of Mariano Melgar blazed for a few short years over his native Peru before he perished in front of a firing squad in the first wave of anti-imperial insurgency. A polymath of capacious intellect, Melgar left behind a body of poetry dominated by a tortured love affair that is memorialized in his famous "Letter to Silvia," but that includes also fables sharply critical both of colonial exploitation of indigenous labour, and of mindless mass violence. This selection from Melgar's writings offers the English-speaking world a first glimpse of a poet who dedicated his brief but vivid life to national liberation and the quest for a just social order.”

Miles writes: "To bring Mariano Melgar into English for the first time is to bring before new readers not only his poetry, but the compelling story of a young poet of rare conviction, for whom literature was truly, in Roberto Bolaño’s phrase, “a dangerous occupation”. Those of us who live by words owe something to the people who stood up when called upon: to remember them, whatever their language, wherever on earth they lived. Melgar was dangerous because he understood the power of poetry to move people. He was a poet who challenged conventions, whose words could unsettle the established order, giving revolution a vocabulary of love and social justice. He was not merely a romantic martyr – he was a renegade poet, a poète maudit, avant la lettre."

Coetzee and Miles present their work on translating Melgar at Hay Festival, Arequipa, on 7 November 2026.

For review copies and other queries, please e-mail nick@bat.is.