The novel De bestias y aves, by the writer and translator Pilar Adón (Madrid, 1971), won the National Narrative Award 2023 yesterday for “its great originality, beauty, poetic richness and strength of language”. The award, granted by the Ministry of Culture and Sport, is endowed with 30,000 euros.
In the dystopian De bestias y aves (Galaxia Gutenberg), the protagonist, a woman on the edge and carrying a drowned sister on her back, arrives at an isolated house, almost a territory outside the world, where women live exclusively. Some women who, to her surprise, know her and who all dress in the same way, as if they were adepts of an ancestral cult, and who carry out strange rites and celebrations. A place where the protagonist may finally discover what it means to be part of something.
The jury emphasized that “the story told is as fantastic as it is close and recognisable. The work, written in an impeccable style that at times verges on lyricism, manages to immerse the reader in a disturbing, suffocating and dreamlike atmosphere”. In addition, the jury highlighted that “Pilar Adón, with her unique voice, outside of fashions and trends, and with a sublime capacity to imagine, builds atmospheres and atmospheres of an extraordinary nature that are absolutely captivating”.
Adón accumulates another award for De bestias y aves, which has already obtained the Francisco Umbral prize for the Book of the Year 2022, the Cálamo Otra Mirada prize 2022 and the Criticism in Spanish language prize 2023. In addition, she is the author of the novels Las hijas de Sara (Alianza) and Las ephímeras (Galaxia Gutenberg), from the story books Viajes inocentes (published by Páginas de Espuma and which won the Ojo Crítico de Narrativa award), El mes más cruel (Impedimenta) and La vida submergida (Gutenberg Galaxy), and the poetry collections Da dolor, Las ordénes, Mente animali and La hija del cazador. He has translated works by authors such as John Fowles, Penelope Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton.
The award jury was chaired by María José Gálvez, general director of the Book, and the writers Rosa Montero, Edurne Portela, Marina Mayoral and Marilar Aleixandre – winner of last year’s National Narrative Award for the novel ·the one in Galician As malas métieres (Galaxia)–, the critic José María Pozuelo Yvancos, the journalist Fernando González Urbaneja, members of the different language academies of the State such as Pedro Álvarez de Miranda or Josep Palomero, and Teresa San Segundo , from the Gender Studies Center of the UNED.
