2023-04-18 22:29:36
Pilar Adn receives the award for the best book published in 2022 for ‘De bestias y aves’, a novel about intimate pain and nature that connects with her work as a poet
Pilar Adn, novelist, poet, translator and editor, arrived yesterday at the list of winners of the Francisco Umbral Prize to broaden the meaning of the award that chooses the best book of each year. After the Threshold chose in its first 11 editions the works of great consolidated authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Fernando Aramburu, Manuel Longares and Antonio Soler, of beasts and birdsthe Adam novel that received the Threshold Prize yesterday, made the conversation turn towards new, more intimate and subtle terrain… But it also linked to the legacy of Francisco Umbralwhom Adán praised in his award acceptance speech for his militancy as a full writer, his commitment to naked language and, at the same time, his tremendous lyrical capacity to describe love, pain and his time.
The first thread that unites Adam with Threshold is that of the monomania of literature, the fucking tyranny of the muses and the obsessive need to exist in the literary text. I have little life outside of my professional life, said the author in a public dialogue with Manuel Llorente and Fany Rubio, members of the jury who chose De bestias y aves. Juan Cruz, Carlos Fernández Aganzo, César Antonio Molina, José Luis Morales Fernando Rodríguez Lafuente, Javier Rodríguez Marcos and Santos Sanz Villanueva also participated in the jury that presided over Mara Espaa Surez, widow of Umbral and president of the foundation that bears her name. Suárez congratulated the author and expressed her wish that the Threshold Award continue to honor the Spanish language.
In the middle, Manuel Llorente made the eulogy of the winning novel. Pilar Adn’s literature breathes a poetic halo, without stridency. The most terrible thing happens underground, calm, until it surfaces and overflows. It is preparing us, little by little, to delay the conflict, the outbreak of what will come, said the journalist. These blurred environments, as if painted in watercolor, are very much in the style of Pilar Adn. They are atmospheres illuminated by that indecisive and warm winter sun.
Later, the spokesman for the jury related the winning novel with the poetry of its author and read some of his verses: Reader who assumes these verses / you must know that their author is an ignoble beast / who cannot keep quiet. That she writes / about entrails and decent people, / and wakes up every day inside a head / spilled in screeching.
I had never dared to read that poetry in public, Adan replied, explaining in his talk his moral decision to not be complacent because literature has a duty to make us think. Adam remembered that he was born a woman, in 1971. We were taught to please, to be modest, to know how to be. It is something that has stayed with me, that I continue to do and it seems good to me. I try to be nice. But I want not to indulge in literature.
The challenge of of birds and beasts for the reader it is the usual one: the one of complete the ellipses of the story with your experience. The story of the novel is that of a woman wounded by the death of her sister, who flees to nowhere, until running into a community of women who live in intimacy with nature and in the desire to refound her ties. . In this landscape, the protagonist blurs and redraws herself in a game of vanishing.
For Adam, of beasts and birds has something very intimate: he talks about his father, his relationship with nature and the topics that interest me the most: fear, flight, the desire to be elsewhere… to which I add the inquiry into the need of belonging and the need to find your own space to call home.
Themes that also represent a thread with the nucleus of the work of Francisco Umbral. Joaqun Manso, the director of the newspaper EL MUNDO, promoter of Fundacin Umbral, spoke in his speech of the memory of the writer in the renewed history of the newspaper in which he wrote many of his best pages. I speak on behalf of the generation that today makes up ELMUNDO, which carries in its heart those who were the protagonists of its intellectual formation. […] The pleasures and the days [el nombre de la columna de Umbral en ELMUNDO] discovered for us a new way of understanding the world, a new way of understanding life. Manso also addressed Adán to thank him for the certain news that the world is strange and wonderful to open pupils.
Adn was covered last night: she was accompanied by representatives of the Ministry of Culture, the Community of Madrid, the municipalities of Valladolid and Majadahonda and the Valladolid Provincial Council, as well as the sponsor of the award, El Corte Ingls, its editors from Galaxia Gutenberg, former winners such as Elena Medel, Antonio Soler and Manuel Longares and her husband, the editor Enrique Redel.
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