Good morning, I present to you Daria Kovalenko Petrova, born in Ukraine in 1992, when we celebrated here the Seville Expo and the Barcelona Olympics, but moved to Spain as a child. Years have passed, she has been a Spanish national for a long time, it is December 21, 2019 and she is sitting in Kiev airport without a ticket in her hand. But it is better for her to speak: «I have known uprooting and nostalgia and I have accepted that it is not a stage, that it is part of me. It’s time to leave self-pity behind. It’s time to let go of the guilt. For the first time in months, I feel like my heart isn’t pumping blood in a strange way, that my head isn’t in severe pain, and that loneliness isn’t stuffing my throat anymore. Just 20 years ago, she flew to Barcelona in a family exodus she hadn’t chosen. Now he knows very well that “to leave is to leave” and that “to leave is always to die a little”. That more or less. Daria Kovalenko Petrova is the main character in the first novel written by someone else whose name was not Fuensanta, exactly, but Margaryta Yakovenko, also a Ukrainian born in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, who landed in Spain one day with their immigrant parents. Daria Kovalenko Petrova and Margaryta Yakovenko live together in ‘Desencajada’, the novel edited by Caballo de Troya that has just been chosen by thousands of young students as winner of the 2023 Mandarache Prize, the icing on the cake of the Mandarache project that has been 2004 is promoted by the Department of Youth of the City Council of Cartagena with the aim, this is fair and necessary, to “provide cultural education and promote the culture of the book”. Each year we welcome the unique members of a jury made up of young people from Cartagena in Spain, Cartagena in Colombia and Cartagena in Chile. This year they did this by promoting a work that opens with the words of Anne Carson: «It is an open secret among pilgrims and other theorists of this traveling life that you become addicted to the horizon». Daria Kovalenko Petrova was told by her father “you have to move” and her mother “everything that has to be done will be done”. She added over time that “the horizon is our only promise of freedom”. The young people of the Mandarache have not rewarded anything but a story that speaks of migration and a whole generation of young people who usually face a state of crisis, not only economic, permanent. And they must know how to deal with vulnerability cunningly. ‘Desencajada’ is also a lesson in contemporary history that is shown to us with soul. Anyway, in 2022 the Mandarache Prize was once again a celebration, recognizing for the first time the importance and critical happiness that good theater texts can bring you, in this case ‘La valentía’ by Alfredo Sanzol. It is a pleasure to hear this award-winning author and theater director talk about his passion for reading, which is already heavenly when the desire to tell or listen to stories is added to it. Sanzol liked to tell it to his little Juan, who enjoyed picturing his father’s words. But beware: sometimes it was little Juan who suggested the theme of the story, or he told himself his own stories and made up his own jokes. Sanzol came up with the ‘Endless Tale’ for his son, whose protagonist is water, which he turned into a character who has many adventures, because from a well it becomes a river, from a river to a sea, from a sea to a cloud, from cloud to rain, and so on. Juan was shocked. His father also tried to teach him to appreciate how lucky he is to have it at his disposal, and how important it is to make good use of it. Hey, in this region it should be mandatory to know this ‘Endless Tale’ by heart. Babysitters Clara Sánchez is right, who also won the Mandarache in 2013 with ‘What hides your name’, and who entered the Language Academy so smoothly this year: life would be much sadder if we couldn’t read. She also feeds on stories, which she devours in books or invents herself, like Sanzol, always following her childhood habit of observing reality, being surprised and describing it to others, with a look that tries to penetrate the unseen. And he owes his love for observing, imagining and describing partly to his parents. Because? Well, because his parents gave him a babysitter, yes, but not just any babysitter, but one that didn’t see three or more on a donkey. “Things from my parents, imagine! My babysitter was practically blind, she really couldn’t see anything, and I had to practically explain everything to her, describe everything,” she tells you. And they entered into an accomplice relationship, and somehow they took care of each other, and the writer learned that it was better to go through the fog all together.
Source: La Verdad
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