• Interview. "I felt a quota. It replaced the one that had been before and another would come later"

Las maravillas

, by Elena Medel (Anagrama), has been chosen as the best book published in Spain in 2020 by the jury of the Francisco Umbral Prize.

The text is

the first novel by the Cordovan poet and publisher

and also functions as

a story of economic power and its effect on the experience of women and in Spanish politics

, from the death of Franco to the March 8 demonstration. 2018. Its protagonists are three women, a grandmother, a mother and a granddaughter who are not kind of well off, who contrast their experiences until they build a common story.

"I wrote

Las Maravillas

without a clear expectation of publishing it. I already had three saved novels, unpublished. I wrote it for the enjoyment of writing them, which may be the best way to write. And that, furthermore, I think is transmitted to the reader," he says Medel to EL MUNDO.

"

The book talks about money, about the lack of money, about precariousness and about politics

. There are many discussions about politics although they may not seem so at first glance. The voices that tell them are three working-class women who are in a geographical and decision periphery ".

The core of the narrative is in the character of Alice.

"In the three novels that I have saved, that character is a secondary character that increasingly claimed place. First he appeared as a girl, then as a teenager and then almost in his 30s. In reality, the desire to write was a desire to write about her, to find out how she thought. I wrote a text as a draft, which later became a chapter of the book,

The Kingdom

and there were already the themes of the novel: social classes, poverty. On the other hand, there was

another impulse that it is in everything I write

and that is to tell universal stories from a radically feminine voice ", Medel explains.

Does that sound like

The Wonders

there is a lot of essay book that builds the narrative?

"As a reader I do not make distinctions. Eva Illouz's books are important in this book, but also the poetry of T

homas Chatterton

and the novels of Martín Gaite, Gopegui, Marta Sanz, Chirbes ...".

What

Las Maravillas

is

not is

a sing-song novel and the kind of storytelling that is usually expected from poets.

"It is not a poet's novel because it is a harsh narrative.

I don't know if it can be lyrical in that harshness

. Perhaps it can. But it is poetic because the work has consisted in pruning a lot, in reaching an essence of the text. And that's the way it is. how I conceive poetry ".

The wonders

happens in the winners of the Umbral Award for Hard

Times

by Mario Vargas Llosa.

The Prize has an endowment of 12,000 euros and a bronze sculpture by Alberto Corazón and has in its track record authors such as

Manuel Longares, José Manuel Caballero Bonald, Fernando Aramburu and Rafael Chirbes

.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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