“It is one of the necessary jewels in my library.” This is how Sonsoles Ónega, winner of the last Planeta award with The Maid’s Daughters, speaks about the novel El Camino by Miguel Delibes that she discovered when she was a teenager of thirteen or fourteen years old. “She awakened my desire to read and write,” she says. And not only this. The work that the writer from Valladolid published in 1950 about the memories of a village boy the night before leaving for the city to study, was the first book that made the journalist cry. “At the end,” she clarifies without giving spoilers.
“It is simple but very profound, with continuous evocations of the rural world that I have installed deep inside me,” he continues explaining in the podcast The Secret Books. A coming-of-age novel that “I would love for my children to read now.”
Rurality is not the only point that brings the two writers closer. Delibes, like Ónega, dedicated himself to journalism. “He said that his work as a journalist had given him the tools to write very stripped of ornaments. That sets me apart. It is my peculiar revenge against the dictatorship of time that condemns words,” he argues.
The author of other essential works of 20th century Spanish literature such as Five Hours with Mario or Los Santos Innocents ended up abandoning journalism to dedicate himself exclusively to literature, something that the presenter rules out for the moment. “I am very happy being a journalist because it fuels me a lot when creating characters,” she explains.
“I will never demonize television, which has opened the doors of my homes, which is where books have to enter.” And he adds: “I don’t want to be valued as an intellectual novelist. I want to be valued as a journalist who writes stories that keep me company. This would be an epitaph that I would happily die with.”
The cultural podcast The Secret Books can also be listened to and followed on audio platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts, among others.
