The collaborator of this medium has won the prize with ‘Los ojos cerrados’, a novel that examines the wounds of the civil war
Edurne Portela (Santurtzi, 1974) has won the Euskadi Prize for Literature in Spanish with ‘Los ojos cerrados’, a novel that explores violence and memory, the essential themes of her work, with a different technique and different narrative voices. It delves into the wounds of the Civil War through two characters, an old man who watched his family die and a young woman who grew up in silence and wants to rebuild her story. It is the third novel to appear after ‘Better the Absence’ and ‘Shapes of Being’.
The Minister of Culture, Bingen Zupiria, also announced this morning the awards for Basque translation to Koro Navarro for ‘Fiesta Eguzkia jaikitzen da’, by Ernest Hemingway; Essay in Basque, to Irati Jimenez, for ‘Begiak zabalduko zaizkizue’; and Essay in Spanish, to Teresa Maldonado, for “Let’s Speak Clearly.” In this way, the winners are complete after the three prizes awarded last week: Uxue Apaolaza won the one for Literature in Basque with the concatenated stories of ‘Bihurguneko nasa’; Leire Bilbao has won in the Children and Youth category, and Maite Mutuberria, in Illustration.
The awards, endowed with 18,000 euros, will be presented on November 24 in Tabakalera. For the first time in the history of the Euskadi for Literature, all prizes were awarded to women.
Edurne Portela, a collaborator of this medium, became known for the essay ‘The echo of the shots’, a work in which she defended culture as a means of settling the past of violence in the Basque Country. He published it in 2016, the year he returned to Spain after developing his academic career in the United States, earning a PhD in Spanish Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before moving to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. where he stayed. thirteen years. It was at this stage that he began to examine the issues he now deals with from a literary perspective.
In April, the author took part in the latest edition of the Gutun Zuria Letter Festival in Bilbao, giving a lecture addressing some of the issues that characterize her work. In an interview with this newspaper, he emphasized the importance of the memory after the end of terrorism in Euskadi. “On the one hand, there is a very strong realization that a delegitimization of violence is needed, to create a society that is aware of what has happened, of what we have and have not done. Things have happened here. We can give a thousand examples of barbarisms that ETA did, and those things were allowed by a section of society. On the other hand, we have that impulse that any society that has gone through such explicit violence feels: to wipe the slate clean,” the writer explained, underlining the need to move forward with the younger generations in education.
With regard to sexist violence, he emphasized the existence of a “changing sensibility” that helps to expose events that could previously go unnoticed. “Some will say, ‘These tough feminists are here again, finding sexist violence on all sides.’ It is necessary to analyze and decipher these gestures, to make them visible and to point to them».
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
