What is it like to live in ten different apartments in the last three decades? Llucia Ramis (Palma, 1977) knows this well. This Thursday, the Mallorcan writer and journalist won the fourth edition of the Asteroid Books Non-Fiction Award with the project One Square Meter. Ten apartments and thirty years in Barcelona, ??an investigation into the issue of housing in Spain.
“I am very happy and I am very excited to receive this award,” she told La Vanguardia shortly after the award, which has a prize of 7,000 euros, was announced. Ramis has advanced that this future book is born from “the need to investigate the reasons that make young people have problems emancipating themselves. And some adults too, because it is not easy to assume a rental if you do not live together as a couple.”
The journalist’s intention is to “visit each and every one of the ten houses in which I have lived. I am interested in knowing who lives now, what they pay for rent and, above all, how the neighborhood has changed since I was there.”
The project will have a journalistic part that combines autobiographical chronicle, since “having lived in so many different apartments allows me to make various analyses.” One of them, he confesses, is “why assimilated precariousness develops” or “how the gap between people who belong to the same salary spectrum is increasingly evident, depending on whether or not part of their salary is dedicated to living place”.
The jury, made up of Jordi Amat, Daniel Capó, Leila Guerriero, Daniel Gascón and the editor Luis Solano, has assessed, in addition to the universal interest in the topic addressed and its approach, the “narrative solvency” of the author.
