The RAE plenary session held this Thursday has chosen the writer and philologist Clara Sánchez (Guadalajara, March 1, 1955) to occupy the X chair, which had been vacant since the death of Francisco Brines, on May 20, 2021. His candidacy was presented by the academics Soledad Puértolas, Carme Riera and Paloma Díaz-Mas.
Sánchez’s candidacy has been imposed on that of fellow writer Jon Juaristi, who had been presented by Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, Félix de Azúa and Carlos García Gual. With her, there are nine women who occupy an academic chair among the 46 members of the corporation.
Sánchez graduated in Hispanic Philology from the Complutense University with a thesis that dealt with the Mexican Narrative of Onda: Gustavo Sainz, a study aimed at unraveling how the so-called Mexican “youth” was lashing narrative art and giving it a freshness and irreverence. unknown.
At the Complutense he entered the field of semantics under the baton of the academic Gregorio Salvador Caja. She was a university professor for seventeen years at UNED, and she has also participated as a commentator, columnist and collaborator in various Spanish and foreign media.
Since his first novel, Piedras preciosas (1989), critics have highlighted the originality and modernity of his narrative, its contemporaneity, as fundamental contributions to the literature of the late 20th century.
In his later work, he has not given up in his efforts to investigate the ins and outs of the present, to capture what the times bring. “She herself has confessed her obsession with ripping off the extraordinary from the ordinary, the surprising from the most routine lives,” the RAE said in a note.
His vital feeling of strangeness and discomfort in the face of life, carried over from childhood, has been reflected in all his novels in characters who are forced to adapt to new and untimely situations such as the strange look on the urbanization where the boy from Latest News lives del paraíso (2000), which was awarded the Alfaguara Award.
Other of his novels from his fruitful work are Night is no different (1990), The stranded palace (1993), From the viewpoint (1996), The mystery of every day (1999), A million lights (2004), Premonitions (2008), What hides your name (2010, Nadal award), Come into my life (2012), Heaven has returned (2013, Planeta award), When light comes (2016), The silent lover (2019) or Hell in paradise (2021).
The novel I peccati di Marisa Salas (2022), edited by Garzanti, Italy, “will soon arrive in Spain,” says the RAE. Clara Sánchez has been translated into several languages ??and her work has significant international repercussions, especially in Italy. She has prefaced books, among others by Mercè Rodoreda (Broken Mirror), by Yukio Mishima (The sailor who emerged from the grace of the sea) or by Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).
