Rosario Villajos wins the Brief Library Award with a story about the female body as a battlefield

• Isaac Rosa, Biblioteca Breve Award "There are many creators from the left, but there are not so many novels and films from the left"

• Graphic note Woman, body and freedom

"There is a lot of talk about the little emotional education that men have and we see that they are trying (at least) to remedy that, but there is hardly any talk about the bodily education of women and I wanted to know where

."

From this reflection was born

, the new novel by the writer Rosario Villajos (Córdoba, 1978) who won the 65th Biblioteca Breve de Seix Barral Prize this afternoon, endowed with 30,000 euros.

Another 701 manuscripts were candidates for the prize.

Set in the early 1990s,

draws the portrait of Catalina, an adolescent marked by a complicated relationship with her own body and by resentment towards

.

After suffering a serious mishap at the house of her best friend, located on the outskirts of her, the young woman needs to return to her home as soon as possible, so she will have no choice but to hitchhike.

She doesn't like the idea of ​​it very much.

but

imposed by her parents.

"Catalina forges her personal rebellion against the world because she sees how her entry into adolescence is an

. She regrets never being up to what is expected of her and that is something that anguishes her. This is simply the story of a girl refuses to disappear in all those taboos and restrictions that grip her", explains Villajos, who affirms that the book highlights the stories on which the values ​​of an entire generation are built.

, but also that of the women who disappeared on the news and the Alcàsser girls, the one for whom the ideal of beauty was Kate Moss and who received a unreal aesthetic image.

Villajos does not hide the political ambition of a novel that fully enters into

, the recent scandal at the Feroz Awards party and the increase in sexual assaults among adolescents.

Looking back to remember where we come from is a need that Villajos addresses from memory itself, although he qualifies: "I don't believe in autofiction.

. Memory is selective and deceptive. I believe that the interpretation that is made of memory is more important than memory itself".

Elected unanimously, the jury of the Biblioteca Breve 2023, made up of Pilar Eusamio, Pere Gimferrer, Inés Martín Rodrigo, Elena Ramírez and last year's winner, Isaac Rosa, highlighted the novel as "a narrative voice that explores its own identity through through the body and that, in doing so, collects the feeling of a generation and

."

That "physical education" of the title, reminiscent of

, does not refer to a single education, but is used by the protagonist in a literal but also metaphorical sense to talk about

, highlighting the stories on which the values ​​of an entire generation are built.

"Values ​​that are barely remembered today," notes the bookseller Pilar Eusamio, "because the silence in which this very young girl is raised when talking about these issues refers to

to a large extent. We have to read it to learn everything that we have forgotten about knowing ourselves.

"In addition to being magnificent and very literary, it is very intelligently composed and enters into discussions of today even though it is set 30 years ago," agrees writer Isaac Rosa.

"She talks about

and she does it through the story, through what the protagonist narrates. She talks about freedom, guilt and desire, body and consent, a word that is fully topical."

Words of praise to which the editor Elena Ramírez adds, who affirms that this work, which Seix Barral will publish - surely with intention - on

, "has a literary approach that already from the title puts on the table a of the pending subjects of our society, and it does so from the narrative voice of an adolescent who explores her identity through the body, in tune with this moment of necessary reflection on gender issues".

Villajos, who assures that her book "

", defends that the body is the field where all battles are fought, where who we are is decided and also where the fears, tensions and violence of each era.

The writer has also recognized that "writing is a way of getting to know each other. I wanted to understand the resentment that I have carried for years, so I went back to the time when that resentment arises, and although my personal story is not that of Catalina, I do

to feel firsthand what happened to other girls and women."

Owner of a generational and autofictional work, Villajos, trained in Fine Arts, previously published two novels:

(Mr. Griffin, 2019), a survey, without nostalgia but with bitterness and humor, in the memory of the generation that today around 40;

and the magnificent

(Aristas Martínez, 2021), the story of a young immigrant in pre-

London that shows how the tribulations and realities of the 21st century world contribute to the

of the individual.

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