Cristina Fernndez Cubas, teacher of storytellers, wins the National Literature Award

2023-11-02 15:00:26

Updated Thursday, November 2, 2023 – 16:03

The Ministry awards the Barcelona narrator in recognition of her career.

Cristina Fernndez Cubas.EL MUNDOEl Columpio Recovered novel Pilar Adn National Narrative Award

The National Prize for Spanish Literature, the award granted by the Ministry of Culture and Sports in recognition of a career as a whole, has gone to Cristina Fernández Cubas, a narrator from Barcelona with a 40-year career. The award jury has highlighted the author “for the magic of her narrative that has led her to be considered one of the best Spanish storytellers. For her fascinating mastery of the use of concision to tell stories, which are nourished by fantastic literature, and which reach the reader in an intense way until they change the way of understanding things.” Likewise, the jury highlighted that “Fernndez Cubas is an unavoidable author who invites us to think on the limits between reality and fiction, an exquisite creator who always wanted to tell stories.

All the stories (Tusquets, 2008), the compilation that brought together the first five books of stories by Fernández Cubas, was the first milestone that drew mass attention to the work of its author. There they appeared 21 accounts written as thumbnails and united by a sense of instability, by ambiguously portraying the morality and verisimilitude of their characters. In the texts of Fernández Cubas, what seemed true ended up being swampy and the characters with whom it was easy to empathize ended up being the most unsettling.

“And it was like this from my first book,” Fernández Cubas recalls to EL MUNDO minutes after learning of the ruling. “A few years ago we reissued it and I recognized myself perfectly in it… It was called My Sister Elba and it appeared in 1980 in a collection of little silver books that Tusquets published. At that time Tusquets was not the great publishing house that it is today, it was a label small and my expectations were also small. I wrote short stories, which was not a genre that had many readers. I thought it would connect with 100 people, with 200…But my editor, Beatriz de Moura, believed in me and found a way. “Over the years, everything has become more complicated, although I try not to let it show too much.”

Is there a common thread among the 10 narrative titles that Fernández Cubas has published? “Of course. There are many things that have never changed. The concern for language, the obsessive search for precision, for finding the word that most accurately names things. The concerns are also the same. My stories talk about everyday situations. “in which something suddenly appears and breaks with what seemed stable. And there are also spaces, which are made of chiaroscuros, of confusing situations between memory and dream.”

Attics, abandoned houses, childhood memories… The classic settings of fantastic literature. “I don’t consider myself a fantasy writer but it is true that the unnameable, the fantastic, appears and flirts with what I write. And the reason is that I believe in what I see and what I don’t see, because what I don’t see doesn’t have to exist because I don’t see it,” said the author in an interview published by EL MUNDO in 2016.

Nona’s Room (Tusquets, 2015), won the Narrative Prize that year, expanded its prestige and associated Fernández Cubas’s gaze with family relationships and the abyss of childhood. So, when he received the news of that award, Fernández Cubas asked if it had ever happened that a book of short stories received that honor. At that time A new generation of story authors, Spanish and Latin American women, arrived in bookstores. who at that time were around 30 years old and who were often united by an imminence of terror and a very precise sense of the short story. For all of them, Fernndez Cubas was a pioneer.

“My stories are timeless, often the locations are imprecise. I see myself as a timeless writer, but not by much. In reality, the fantastic also serves to reflect on the human condition, which is timeless” says the writer. “I suppose my loved ones will tell you that I am in my world and that this is also evident in my books.”.

Fernández Cubas is also the author of three novels and a book of memoirs, among other works. The National Literature Prize is endowed with 50,000 euros.