Rosario Villajos wins the Brief Library with ‘Physical education’

by time news

The Cordovan writer Rosario Villajos has won this Monday the 65th Brief Library Award, convened by Seix Barral and with an endowment of 30,000 euros, with her work Physical education, whose protagonist explores her own identity through the body.

Isaac Rosa wins the 2022 Brief Library Award with ‘Safe Place’

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The jury for the prize, made up of Pere Gimferrer, Pilar Eusamio, Inés Martín Rodrigo, the editor Elena Ramírez and Isaac Rosa, winner of the last edition, decided to award the prize to Villajos’s novel for having known how to “capture the feelings of a generation” and turn it into “an experience that is both unique and universal”.

Set in the early 90’s Physical education, which has prevailed among the 702 manuscripts submitted for the award, draws the portrait of an adolescent marked by a complicated relationship with her own body and by resentment towards a world determined to make her guilty for being a woman.

The protagonist, Catalina, forges her personal rebellion against the world through the struggle not to give up her own freedom, freedom of movement, freedom to be and to show herself as she is, even if that means taking risks.

It is a novel about the discovery of one’s own body, about the education that we inherit, but also about the one that we do not receive: “Catalina’s education, like that of so many women of different generations, is largely built on the blow of restrictions , of prohibitions for their own good, and which entails the acceptance of a violence that is not questioned and some risks inherent to being a woman from which there is no escape.

“Physical Education” also offers a journey through the nineties, in a country marked by economic optimism and social panic, a period that was a hinge-year between the current wave of feminism and a past marked by machismo.

In an obvious twist to sentimental education by Flaubert, centered on the thoughts and obsessions of a young man and generational portrait in nineteenth-century Paris, Physical educationaccording to the jury, uses an original structure to convey a similar effect: The action takes place in four hours, during which Catalina must hitchhike for barely twenty minutes, although it allows her to go back and forth in the time, reliving various episodes of his life.

Villajos assures that she is not so daring as to wink at Flaubert and at no time did she think about the content of her novel, but “she did think about the title and the sentimental and emotional label that women have been culturally placed on.”

“There is a lot of talk -he continues- about the little emotional education that men have and we see that they are trying to at least remedy that, but there is hardly any talk about the bodily education of women and I wanted to know where all this modesty and all this came from. that ignorance”

For the award winner, “writing is a reckoning with the past, a way of detaching myself from what hurts me, in this case, from the accumulated resentment not only towards the men whom I considered an obstacle at the same time and the goal of my well-being, but also towards myself for having put them at the center”.

The novel, he says, could have been called “The Grudge,” but once he has released himself from the pressure of a man’s gaze over his shoulder, be it his father, his boyfriend, or the master of the day, he feels that in this way novel “I come out better”.

The book, which Seix Barral will publish on March 8, will feature a photograph of a female girdle on its cover: “It is a girdle that is still sold and used, in that obsession to remain thin, as in the case of the mother of Catalina, and of protecting her daughter with a garment so difficult to remove”.

The author wanted to foreground “that pelvis, so important, but which seems to belong to society, and not to the woman, aware of what is inside”.

In full menopause, the author says she is living “a second adolescence”, a little calmer because she knows how to hold back in public, but “with some changes in her body that remind me of those I experienced in my youth.”

However, Villajos does not believe in autofiction: “I believe that everything is fiction, even what seems most autobiographical.”

In her opinion, “all fiction stems from an autobiographical sentiment”, and in the case of her novel “sexual terror is common among women of my generation, a topic that has been talked about lately, but it doesn’t seem to be causing much change.” and I wanted to approach it from the perspective of the body and the education received in this regard”.

Referring to the “only yes is yes” law, Villajos recalls that “the issue of consent has been discussed for a long time” and for this reason he wanted to place it in the 90s “to explain where we come from.”

Born in Córdoba in 1978, Villajos dedicated her entire childhood to drawing and reading; She trained in Fine Arts and has worked in the music, film, artistic, and cultural industries.

As a writer, she is the author of the graphic novel Face (2017) and the novels Ramona (2019) y the tooth (2021), a delirious story about loneliness and precariousness in today’s society.

Villajos, who proudly confesses that he maintains his Andalusian accent, has lived in Córdoba, Seville, Granada, Barcelona, ​​Montpellier and London, and currently resides in Madrid, where he combines writing with a job in IT.

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