Guadalajara International Book Fair

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Guest of Honor Pavilion

Spain, Guest of Honor
Guest of Honor Pavilion
Journeys. Tribute to Ana María Matute

At the age of five, in a dark room full of closets, the time-out zone, Ana María Matute (1925-2014) wrote her first story. From that moment on, the writer was hooked on words. Next year marks the hundredth anniversary of her birth. A member of the Royal Spanish Academy 1998, Cervantes Prize winner in 2010 and Nobel nominee multiple times, Matute's fiction is the literature of astonishment. Like Carmen Martín Gaite and Josefina Aldecoa, Ana María Matute was part of the Generation of '50. With those writers, she shared a deep social concern, but also dreams and friendships defined by the unavoidable pain of a childhood marked by a fratricidal war. However, the universe of this Catalan author and her long production, with stories for both adults and children, as well as her novels, meandered into the dark corners of the sensory, the fantastic imaginary and the poetic. "Allow me to make a plea. If at some point you stumble upon a story with some of the creatures that inhabit my books, please believe them, believe them because I invented them." The central protagonists of her works were the children and those who stopped being children to enter the difficult age of adolescence. Withdrawn, introverted children, marginalized in school or ignored by adults, amazed by a reality that hurts them; shabby children who didn't even have a name, are saved thanks to the power of imagination. One of her first novels, Fireflies, shortlisted for the Nadal Prize and the Premio de la Crítica in 1949, was forbidden by Franco's censors, a book that would not be published with its original title and in its entirety until 1993. Her story books, written by one of the most famous authors of Spanish literature, include: Los niños tontos, Historias de la Artámila and El río; her novels: Soldiers cry by night, Some boys, Trap; in addition to the medieval epic trilogy: La torre vigía, Olvidado Rey Gudú and Aranmanoth, characters that now belong to the imagination of readers around the world.

Participants: Ledicia Costas, Anna Soldevila

Moderator: Inés Martín Rodrigo

Ledicia Costas

Invitado de Honor

(Vigo, 1979) is one of the most recognized and translated authors of Galician literature, with works in languages such as Persian, Korean, Italian and Bulgarian.

She published her first novel, Unha estrela no vento, in the year 2000. Since then, she has published 30 works of children's and young adult fiction, adult literature, and poetry, which are still being printed by Edicións Xerais de Galicia, Anaya, Destino and Nórdica Libros, among other leading Spanish publishers.

In the field of children's and young adult literature, she has received notable awards, like the Premio Nacional de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil, presented to her in 2015 by the Ministry of Culture for her work Escarlatina, la cocinera cadáver.

She twice won the award Premio Merlín de Literatura Infantil, and she is the only person in the history of the Lazarillo Award (the oldest in children's and YA literature in Spain) to have won it three times, the last time in 2022 with La liebre mecánica.

In 2020, she received the Premio da Cultura de Galicia de Creación Literaria award, the youngest person to receive it in the history of the award, and in 2023 she received the Medalla Castelao from the Galician regional government, in recognition of her contribution to culture throughout her career.

Internationally, she has received prizes such as The White Ravens Award, presented by the Library of Munich, and been included in the IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) Honor List.

In 2022, she returned to poetry with the work Ultraluz, winner of the prestigious 20th Premio de Poesía Afundación award.

Her work for adults includes the novels Infamia (2019), Golpes de Luz (2021) and Piel de cordero (2024).

Other activities involving the participant:
Matters of death (or life)

Anna Soldevila

Invitado de Honor

(Barcelona, 1981)

Anna has a degree in Humanities from the Universidad Pompeu Fabra. She has worked in the publishing sector since 2004. In 2015, she joined Ediciones Destino as executive editor, a renowned imprint since 1942 that has published the most prominent Spanish and international writers. It combines the prestige of a highly regarded backlist with the discovery of new literary authors, and has organized the Nadal Novel Prize annually since 1944.

Inés Martín Rodrigo

Invitado de Honor

(Madrid, 1983) is a writer and journalist. In 2022, she won the Nadal Prize with the novel Las formas del querer, which also received the Premio de la Crítica de Madrid. She is also the author of the biographical fiction Azules son las horas (2016), the anthology of interviews with women writers Una habitación compartida (2020), the children's story Giselle (2020), and the essay Una homosexualidad propia (2023).

In 2019, she was included in the “10 de 30” program of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), which every year recognizes the best Spanish writers under 40 years old. For 14 years she worked for the Culture section of the ABC newspaper and in June 2022, she joined the Prensa Ibérica group, where she is on the team of the literary supplement abril and writes opinion pieces.

Other activities involving the participant:
In no man's land: the place of war
Rain without ice, please: the world is thirsty
Free time with a tourist personality
Journeys. Tribute to Carmen Martín Gaite

Thursday December 05
11:00 to 11:50
Pabellón de España, Expo Guadalajara