The Argentine Sofía Balbuena wins the IX Ribera del Duero Prize for Short Fiction | Culture | EUROtoday

secondary character is the title of the ebook that brings collectively 5 lengthy tales about friendship, good and unhealthy intentions, and interior hells that beat in ladies’s heads. Its creator, Sofía Balbuena (Salto, Argentina, 42 years outdated), grew to become the primary protagonist on the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid this Thursday when the choice of the IX Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Prize was introduced, a biennial competitors promoted by the publishing home Páginas de Espuma and the Ribera del Duero Denomination of Origin, endowed with 25,000 euros and the publication of the ebook on that label.

Up on stage, Balbuena remembered the picture of her mom studying within the kitchen of the household residence, when everybody was asleep. “Books were my mother’s secret. And writing is my perfect way to interrupt her, break the limit, make her look at me,” he joked, earlier than thanking her for instructing him to learn and apologizing for not telling her that he was going to win the prize. Regarding the work with which he received, the jury, chaired by the Colombian creator Juan Gabriel Vásquez and made up of the writers Nuria Barrios and Paulina Flores, the editor Juan Casamayor and the president of the DO Ribera del Duero regulatory council, Enrique Pascual, highlighted in its ruling the exploration that he undertakes with “irony and even with a point of subversion, the affective conventions – the forms of love, friendship and everything in between – of the contemporary world.” The jury additionally highlighted “the morally complex universe” that the creator describes on this her first ebook of brief tales.

“secondary character It has a very astute architecture, the stories it brings together converse and enrich each other. Tobias Wolff said that a good story book was like a novel in which the characters do not know each other, and that happens with this work by Sofía Balbuena,” said Vásquez. The vulnerable characters who inhabit the stories in the book are surprised in these stories in “a moment of epiphany, in which they understand something about themselves and their place in the world, brief but rich emotions,” Vásquez added, and connected secondary character with the fertile tradition of the Argentine story mentioning the connection with Borges, Cortázar and Manuel Puig.

For her part, Nuria Barrios highlighted “the novel look and intelligent criticism that Balbuena undertakes in these stories about women of the 21st century, who know where they are and who they are, but are trapped in a narrative that does not belong to them, inherited from their mothers and grandmothers.” The ebook, he introduced, begins with a being pregnant and closes with one other within the final story. The Chilean Paulina Flores referred to considerably extra political elements that transpire in these tales “in which the characters need to find some relief in conforming,” and thus insurgent not directly in opposition to the concept of ​​success and triumph. “They are ladies who assist their companions, one thing very Latin American, however right here they’re drunk artists. There is one thing very enjoyable and really emotional,” he noted.

Balbuena, author of Smaller rubber (Caballo de Troya, 2024), did not avoid the irony of receiving the Ribera del Duero award: “What occurs is handy. The universe has been equalized,” he joked. His published work to date includes People without peace (a project he undertook with Sabina Urraca and Daniel Saldaña Paris, published by Almadía), as well as the novel Clothes (appeared for the moment only in Argentina).

The tales of secondary character He started them in Iowa (USA) where he completed an MFA in Creative Writing. “There I wrote two and a half tales. And I returned to the ebook final summer time. I wished to discover a sure binarism, a universe in relationship, a duo that desires to be collectively however for various causes,” explains the writer, who also worked as a bookseller at Lata Peinada in Madrid and who today teaches writing courses in that same city where she lives. “From the third individual I entered that inside hell that many ladies carry inside us and that we don’t present in order that they don’t name us noisy, fanatic or loopy. It is what’s lived inside, what one bites in silence, that secondary character in our lives to which the title alludes.” The transition to short stories and short fiction has taken Balbuena, as she states, to another place as a writer, far from the autofiction she had worked on until now: “These stories have allowed me to develop the mechanism of imagination.”

In its IX version, the Ribera del Duero Prize has acquired greater than 1,900 manuscripts from over thirty international locations, reaffirming its consolidation as a well-established competitors in literature in Spanish on each side of the Atlantic, and one of the vital acknowledged in brief fiction since its creation in 2008. secondary character(which can go on sale on May 6, additionally in digital and audiobook format) received over the finalist works written by Rodrigo Fuentes, Aura García Junco, Margarita Leoz and Claudia Ulloa Donoso. The listing of winners in earlier editions contains Marcos Giralt Torrente, Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Liliana Colanzi and Magalí Etchebarne.