Silvia Hidalgo (Seville, 1978) is the winner of the 19th Tusquets Prize for novels with Nothing to Say, a novel that the author has explained is “born from very carnal impulses, very skin-deep, from feelings that we try not to embrace, because they are uncomfortable, vulnerable, and that we do not like to recognize, such as spite, the desire for revenge, anger, annoyance, even envy…they are uncomfortable and we never assume them.” Feelings that the protagonist suffers, “that she rebels from sadness with anger. It seems that women, by education, do not feel comfortable with anger and we always say: ‘I don’t get angry; I get sad. Well, it’s okay to get angry, because getting angry, at least, puts us on a path,” she asserted.
Hidalgo’s work was chosen from a total of 672 manuscripts submitted for the award, which added an artistic work to the financial prize of 18,000 euros, a bronze statuette designed by Joaquín Camps. The jury – made up of Antonio Orejudo, Bárbara Blasco, Eva Cosculluela and Cristina Araújo – highlights that the novel “is the dazzling psychological portrait of a woman faced with her contradictions and the maelstrom of modern life, a truthful and lacerating story about the experience of desire and passion, about how one overcomes the midlife crisis, the anxiety about social success, the disenchantment of home, the attraction for the forbidden.”
To which the award-winner added in the presentation press conference: “The protagonist comes from a situation of uprooting and detachment and that causes her discomfort in the search for happiness. But she is damaged and that damage makes her go from sadness to anger, to rage.” And Cosculluela wanted to talk about anger, who highlighted “the tone of the novel; very fresh, cheeky, but also with a touch of bad temper. I don’t know if this came naturally to you,” she asked him. “Yes, the idea arose on a trip, when I had a fever… and yes, I really liked that angry and angry tone. That drive I had for violence and anger. Then, in a more intellectual process, I preferred not to write it in the first person, but rather that there was a narrator and that narrator confronted the protagonist.”
Blasco explained that it was a novel that talked about love and admitted that “what fascinates me about the book is the style, the work with language, which is wonderful.” Orejudo valued that “the woman who speaks in the novel is implacable, especially with herself. But the writer is also relentless and this shows in that apparently fast naked style.” Cosculluela wanted to talk about rhythm, which “is winning and winning and is taking us where she wants the readers to go.” The author added that “a fiction in a novel has to have a rhythm and that does not mean that things have to happen, but that it keeps you tied to the story, due to the emotions that are expressed.”
Araújo highlighted that it caught his attention “that in many works everything revolves around frustration over love, and here I liked that when you go through a mourning for something around you, many other things always happen at the same time. And in the novel there is a complete photograph of a woman’s moment, because all this that revolves around you also influences your life, your happiness and is often left out.”
The author, who is a computer engineer and works in the field of cybersecurity, closes her eyes when asked where she finds her time. She moves her hands and makes them flip in the air, in a dancer’s feint outside the fish tank, and confesses to La Vanguardia: “I get them from wherever I can, that when it started it was like a fever and then you get, as best you can, at times, until 3 in the morning…”.
The editorial director of Tusquets Antonio Orejudo declared that “Nothing to say” “dazzled us by its extraordinary modernity, there is no self-pity, there are no clichés of the romantic tradition, it is the portrait of a woman who tries to get out of the quagmire with tremendous courage. That is why we dare to say that Silvia Hidalgo is a bit of our Marguerite Duras. Her writing is amazing, with some blows that do not leave us unscathed.”
