Writer's Corner Writer's Corner: Darrell Kastin: Interview on 97.3 WJFD-FM

Contraponto program series, originally broadcast on 19 January 2025

In 2024, Tagus Press published a revised edition (with a new introduction by Katherine Vaz) of Darrell Kastin’s novel The Undiscovered Island, which had been awarded the Independent Publisher Silver Prize for Multicultural Fiction. Kastin is currently finishing a sequel to The Undiscovered Island, titled Tales of the Azorean Nights. He is also the author of The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales and Shadowboxing with Bukowski. For more on Darrell Kastin, please visit his personal website.

Alarmed by her father’s unexplained disappearance, Julia Castro travels from California to her family’s ancestral home in the Azores to find the islands abuzz with tales of ghost ships, seductive sirens, and witchcraft. The mystery deepens when a drowned man’s body is discovered on a mountainside, and an unknown island emerges from the sea. While she is on the hunt for her father, Julia succumbs to the bewitching allure of the islands—and to Nicolau, a fellow musician. History, legend, poetry, and myth are seamlessly interwoven as the novel explores relationships between personal and cultural identity, fate and self-determination, reality, and illusion.

The Undiscovered Island is volume 29 of the Portuguese in the Americas Series, edited by Francisco Cota Fagundes (UMass Amherst).

Please join host Irene de Amaral and Darrell Kastin for a discussion of The Undiscovered Island on WJFD.

To purchase a print copy of The Undiscovered Island, please visit the University of Massachusetts Press website or Amazon.