ACN Barcelona – The writer and training teacher Carles Sala has won the 2023 El Vaixell de Vapor Award with the novel Madame Esvelt, a work of adventure and mystery that shows the current obsession with personal image. The novel has illustrations by Anna Baquero and is aimed at children between 8 and 10 years old. Jesús Castillón, also an educator specializing in music education, won the 2023 Gran Angular Award with Predestinats, a tribute to classic science fiction with time travel, pandemics and societies formed only by women. The volume has a cover made by Ignasi Font and is aimed at young people aged 14 and over.
The award-winning books go on sale this Thursday, October 19, and the official award ceremony will take place on November 7 at a gala in Barcelona. As for the financial endowment of each of the awards, it is 11,000 euros.
A baroness full of romance
The jury of the El Vaixell de Vapor Award has chosen Sala’s work as the best work of children’s literature this year for being a story that “hooks you from beginning to end”, with “very well constructed” archetypal characters and twists in the language that they are “very funny”. Madame Esvelt tells the story of a hot-tempered baroness full of romance who treats everyone with contempt and who is obsessed with being thin and wearing a new dress every day.
When Arlet talks to Mau, his best friend, he discovers that he and many other children in the village sleepwalk every night to the baroness’s cottage, who makes them eat mysterious meatballs that leave them enchanted. With the help of his violin teacher and two very special rodamons, he will have to thwart his evil plans no matter what.
According to Sala, behind a story of adventure and mystery hides an issue as serious as the obsession with the image and the relationship it has with food. The author has assured that the idea arose from some characters that came to his mind and that, once they were clear, the novel was articulated around them.
In fact, he has assured that the children’s audience makes him feel more “comfortable” because adults find it “more difficult to enter into different fantasies”. On the other hand, however, he recognizes that one of the challenges is getting them to “not disconnect”. “If they are not hooked on the second or third page, they can lose the thread, which is why there are always puzzles to solve”, he admits.
Science fiction for young people
On the other hand, the jury for the Gran Angular Award for the work of youth literature was for Predestinats, by Jesús Castillón. A book that according to the experts is explained as a “perfect circle” that starts from a “very shocking” event and that closes “giving meaning to history” with a “surprising” structure.
In this novel, Aurora lives in a future where men have become extinct and society is made up exclusively of women. When the time comes to choose his university studies, he chooses the Escola de Visitant, a faculty surrounded by secrecy.
According to the official version there they prepare the students to search for a remedy that will allow them to have male children again, soon, but they will discover the strange rules of the center, one of which is not to fall in love. What he doesn’t suspect is that, by breaking them, he can change the fate of humanity.
Castillón explained that the story comes from a story he had written a few years ago and that a good part of the final version was written during the pandemic. He has also admitted that when it comes to writing, his system “is a lack of system” and that the stories he ends up putting on paper are the ones he would have liked to read.
The author has also pointed out that, in his case, he writes for children, young people and adults, and in the case of teenagers one of the keys is that the proposal is “agile and fun”, with a “structure that is different” and that it is accompanied by a certain “addiction” so that they do not disconnect.
