The Argentine Belarusian Natalia Litvinova wins the Lumen novel award | Culture | EUROtoday

In a model new auditorium of the Ortega Marañón Foundation, within the previous premises of what was as soon as the Residencia de Señoritas de Madrid, which María de Maeztu directed to advertise college training for ladies, the ruling of the second version of the Lumen Novel Prize. As the editorial director of the label, María Fasce, recalled, this award was initially created by the editor Esther Tusquets within the nineties, and has been recovered by the Penguin Random House group, of which Lumen is at present a component, with the clear goal to reward literature written by ladies. The prize is 30,000 euros and on this event the prize has gone to the poet Natalia Litvinova, who makes her debut with Firefly as a novelist.

Of Belarusian origin, Litvinova arrived in Argentina together with her household in 1996, on the identical day she turned 10. “I finished this book days before sending it to the contest, but I had had this story in my head for many years,” defined the writer, related from Buenos Aires by videoconference. The story of her household and her exile is the thread of Firefly, a guide during which, as he defined, his mom performed an essential function and the notebooks she wrote at Litvinova's request to inform her the vicissitudes and recollections of every part she had skilled. “Although I worked with fragmentary texts, I did not want this book to become a collection of poems.” She achieved it and, based on the jury's ruling, which Ángeles González-Sinde learn, Firefly It comprises “the difficult quality of simplicity,” and “passes from realism to the mythical naturally,” with out giving up “humor and irony.”

The director of the Alberti bookstore in Madrid, Lola Larumbe, referred to the “electric current” that runs by means of the household historical past of a mom and daughter. Clara Obligado, who obtained the Lumen award within the nineties and who additionally is aware of exile, wished to focus on the contradictions in Litvinova's guide, the truth that it’s “luminous although it talks about dark themes and tender in its harshness,” a piece during which she mentioned that “poetry and story beat.” Luna Miguel appeared “super happy” and requested herself: “How is it possible that radioactive toxicity becomes magic?”, earlier than González Sinde closed the jury's flip to talk. The author, former Minister of Culture and present president of the board of trustees of the Reina Sofía Museum highlighted that it’s a lengthy story that spans a number of generations and that the protagonist, confronted with a powerful life change, feels the necessity to harmonize previous and current. “She has an attentive and perceptive language that never falls into the solemn, which makes each event have clarity and an immediate effect,” she highlighted.

Trauma, reminiscence and resistance, Litvinova mentioned when she spoke, have been the keys she had touched on in her poetry and to which she has now returned “at a length that I had not tried.” The brutal tragedy of Chernobyl, about which her compatriot and Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich wrote a harrowing oral historical past, is within the glow of Firefly.

In this second version of the Lumen award, 549 novels have been submitted from Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Spain, United States, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. In the primary version of the award on this new stage, in 2023, the Argentine Leticia Martin was the winner with the thriller Vladimir.