2024-10-09 16:51:00
Wednesday 9 October 2024, 6.51pm
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Veteran of the Euskadi Awards, Harkaitz Cano (Lasarte-Oria, 1975) does not lose his enthusiasm for the recognition. “We can’t think of a better way to recognize the writer’s work, it’s complicated,” he explained yesterday. The one he received for the illustrated album ‘The world is cracked but we are walking there’ (Erein) was the fourth, the second for Children’s and young people’s literature. He has nothing but words of thanks for Fernando and Laia Bernués and recognizes his debt to them. “I claim kleptomania and collages as a creative strategy,” as I did previously in the poetry book “Looking for Volunteers to Scream” (Susa).
-In your presentation in Donostia, you explained that you wanted to “praise libraries”. Do you consider it complete? Today more than ever the prize has let the books do the talking.
– YES. I always want to be a library user, and if I still am, I go every week. I love bookstores and I also love libraries. One does not exclude the other, because libraries are deposits of time, they have a kind of cemetery, there are many small coffins waiting for someone to visit them. Others will never visit them. They show what it means to wait, because sometimes you go looking for a book and it’s not there; and sometimes they are faster than Amazon, because if Amazon brings it to you in 24 hours, in two minutes you have it in the bookstore. They have something of the esoteric mentioned in the book. And often the book you need is right next to the one you went looking for, so the books need to be on display. I am against this hide and seek trend. ‘You can see it on the Internet’, no, you don’t understand. The question isn’t whether or not I can see it on the Internet, it’s the accidentally created dialogue in the book.
-How everyone organizes their shelf based on author, publisher, color… and passing fashions.
– All these games are a science, for all readers or writers, but there is no perfect solution. Doing it in alphabetical order creates gaps in terms of space, and you also have to remember the names of the authors; the publisher allows you the tetris system because they fit better due to the size. I’m a hybrid in this sense, I put them by country or language and then a little ‘sálvese quien pueda’.
-Does receiving the award at the Bidebarrieta Library (Bilbo) give you another point?
– YES. with Jon [Gerediaga] I was commenting that what Koldo Mitxelena was to me Bidebarrieta is to him, a reference library where you can find almost any book you could need, read or want.
-Being a lover of irony and humor, it was created to fill a void if it has an ironic value – in the theater the actor has a book in his hand and it was created so that it was not a simple prop – winning the Premio Euskadi award.
-I think there is a sort of fetishism, because you could say ‘we can make a play with a fake book’, but Fernando [Bernués] he said ‘no, it’s better that the book exists’, it could be the same for the audience or for the actor, but no. It gives it a pinch of truth and that of the Russian doll: a theater with a book, at the same time the book tells the story of the show, that story takes place in a library and the show was filmed in a library, in Santa Teresa di Donostia. They are echoes that feed on each other, and I believe it. Context is often as important as the text, and we need to help build that context. Then we always complain about readers or whatever, but I think the writer’s work is not just the text, in a broad sense and increasingly it is the context.
-Creating a story ultimately doesn’t just mean writing a book.
– Like in this case. Even though this story is mine, the story of the person who shoots down the planes belongs to Fernando and his daughter Laia, and it is also true. This is why I say collective, not just because I talk about other people’s books. And Isabel [Herguera] because he does the illustrations. We also met by chance in Donostia. The night we decided we were going to do the book, we went out for a drink and met her there. ‘No, no, I have a lot to do’, ‘Well, we’ll see, you’ll make it’ and finally the pieces were put together. A story you’ve been hatching, cooking or thinking about for years is put on the road.
-The album is classified in Children’s and young people’s literature, but from the presentation you mentioned that it is a work for “everyone”. In terms of content – death, love, relationships with relatives – and in terms of editing, it is not really a children’s book.
-It is a book to share, as Fernando said in the presentation, it has a sidecar format. It is a book to tell or listen to someone, to be with someone, to guide, to pilot.
-Many voices have pointed out that books for children and adolescents are often infantilized. Is a work like this a way to reclaim this genre or subgenre? That children are not stupid and that we need to give them quality literature.
– I have never been able to classify what I have written. It’s true that they have some characteristics, not such long sentences or stories and simplistic norms in terms of vocabulary or semantics, but then I never know if what I wrote is for children. Or when they tell you your age. I don’t know, every child is a world. I write for everyone, but not for everyone. Or the obsession with understanding and not understanding.
-(…).
Children are indoctrinated from an early age, traumatized and then it lasts a lifetime. The most interesting thing for me is not understanding and you have to learn not to understand, not to understand that one day you will understand. God no For me the gist is this, when you are a child and when you read a comic for adults, because there is a play on words or because you don’t have the historical context, you don’t understand how to act, how to behave, behave well, what to do with who he doesn’t understand. We have to learn that this is a great opportunity, because it shoots you head on. And here lies the essence of creativity.
-What kind of feedback have you received regarding the topics mentioned and the way they are addressed?
Society is changing and our way of writing is also changing with society. This is a game of mirrors, sometimes we are aware of it and sometimes not so much. In terms of feedback, 12-year-olds enjoyed theater more than 10-year-olds, perhaps because they are closer to that level of sophistication we talked about earlier. I got what I don’t usually get with adult photo albums. A group of readers from Eibar who usually deal with adult literature called me, it’s slowly changing and books like this are now taken more seriously. But it’s difficult, if there is a drawing in the middle it is immediately classified as ‘children’s’ literature.
– It could also be classified as a picture album ‘The world is cracked but we are walking right there’ and be nominated for the Euskadi Award. He will be special as a creator.
This happened to us last year when Joseba Larretx won the Illustration of Literary Work prize with the work ‘Ni ez zain Mikel Laboa’ (Elkar). We always joke among ourselves that whoever awards the prize doesn’t know how to make a comic, even if the hands are different, because the script and the drawing are inseparable. There should be an award for comics. Once upon a time perhaps not enough comics were published and the Euskadi Comic Award was not justified. I argue that just as there is a section for essays, there should be one for poetry and comics. If you put poetry in competition with the novel, the novel will win in most cases.
-Perhaps because poetry is seen as a rarer or secondary style?
-It happens, and Jon [Gerediaga] he knows very well that those who say this don’t know that poetry is a consumption, that poetry is not only in poetry books, it is everywhere. If you go to see a Coppola film, listen to a song or read a memorable passage from a novel, you don’t realize it at the time, but the poetry is probably to blame.
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