Mrs Gargantua

Winner of the 2020 Michael Jacobs Prize; shortlisted for the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer's Award

Mrs Gargantua: Stories from Cuba by J.S. Tennant is a brilliantly unconventional and riveting ride through Cuba’s history, drawing on the David and Goliath dynamic of its confrontations with the US and other superpowers. It aspires to capture realities behind the fantastical, exoticised treatment Cuba often receives.

Mrs Gargantua deals with towering figures – both human and non-human – and ambitions which have left their mark on Cuba, the distorted means by which the island is often presented to the outside world. From Columbus and the conquistadores, Ptolemy to Paris Hilton, Hemingway, nuclear warheads and the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, from a nationalist sparrow ‘martyred’ during Cuba’s independence wars to Fidel Castro’s genetically modified super-cow, this non-fiction work exposes the country’s status as a social and biological testing ground and resource to be mined by larger nations.

The book’s title comes from an account of Maria Hoyt, a US heiress who raised a gorilla in Cuba (one of the first to do so beyond Africa). Later her pet was sold to a circus in the United States where she became a celebrity: the famous ‘Mrs Gargantua’. Her story is directly linked to Hoyt’s predecessor in monkey and ape husbandry, the Cuban Rosalía Abreu; reputedly the richest woman in Latin America and a legendary recluse, Abreu became the first person in history – at her mansion in Havana – to breed a chimpanzee in captivity, with unexpected and far-reaching consequences.

Like 'Mrs Gargantua' – Cuba has been endlessly subject to the whims of the human circus that tries to tame her.

The award-winning Mrs Gargantua forms an entirely original, compelling inventory of the author’s twenty-year relationship with the island and its people, while also attempting to sketch Cuba’s wider importance to a political understanding of the Americas, both in tangible and imaginary terms.

JS Tennant is from North Yorkshire and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Salamanca and Cambridge. Formerly poetry editor at The White Review, he is the co-author of Cuba '62: preludes to a world crisis and European delegate of the Don Cornelius Soul Club, Guantánamo. Mrs Gargantua was the first English-language entry to have won the Michael Jacobs Award from the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for Journalism.