Miguel Ángel Oeste with Vengo de ese miedo (Tusquets), in Spanish, and Roser Cabré-Verdiell with Aioua (Males Herbes), in Catalan, have won the third Finestres prize for narrative for a work published in 2022, while the project David Pàmies and David Sánchez El rei dels caragols has won the second edition of the Finestres prize for comics in Catalan, the three endowed with 25,000 euros. The Canícula project, by Adrià Turina, has received a mention for new talent, which will receive €15,000. The verdict was announced this Tuesday at an event in Barcelona with the authors, and the delivery was made at night.
Some verdicts that in narrative have gone to an author with a consolidated career with four novels, in the case of Oeste, while in the case of Cabré-Verdiell it is his first novel.
Oeste has highlighted that although fear is the engine of his book, for him it is a book that “talks about the limits of writing and the defects of whoever writes and who reads it”, and for that reason, after all, it He has defined it as an “open, luminous and hopeful” novel. Regarding his book, the jury, made up of Jordi Costa, Mathias Enard, Camila Enrich, Mariana Enríquez and Carlos Zanón, mentioned “the value of this unique, unrepeatable, courageous and unconventional testimony in which Miguel Ángel Oeste describes the constant abuse of the father under the silent gaze of the mother, both victim and accomplice of the father.
The author of Aioua, for her part, recalled that she wrote it in 2016 and left it parked as a field of experimentation, and later she published stories, especially in Males Herbes itself, where in 2020 she presented the novel, which it went “through an editorial process that must be vindicated.” The jury, made up of Marina Espasa, Anna Guitart, Mara Faye Lethem, Pere Antoni Pons and Gemma Medina, highlighted “the verbal power and display of imagination with which a trip to Iowa is described, which is also a trip to the heart of words and what they want and can say”.
The prize for comics in Catalan also has its dose of rite of passage, because although David Sánchez has been publishing for years –he even received the prize for revelation author at the Barcelona International Comic Fair in 2011 for You have killed me (Astiberri)–, his partner in the project, David Pàmies, is absolutely unprecedented. Even more, Pàmies explained that for him making the comic in Valencian –he is from Elx– and speaking it these days is like “a return to childhood”, because he did it at school and high school in Valencian but it has been twenty years since he hardly He speaks it, because he works in Switzerland, as a researcher in a project to stop doing scientific research with animals. The jury, made up of Anna Abella, Abigail L. Enrech, Max –his Finestres award from last year, Què arrives in bookstores on March 1–, Nadar and Montserrat Terrones, has awarded his project, which the Finestres publishing house will publish on next year, for “the creation of its own and particular universe, developing a well-resolved and addictive plot with a black and surreal tone, the defined and significant use of color, and the definition and characterization of the characters.” The authors have explained that they have always worked by mail, to the point that it was on the spot to make the award public the first time they have seen each other face to face.
Regarding Adrià Turina, winner of the comic mention, he had not published any graphic novel before, and the jury has chosen him “Because of the promising nature of the talent that is manifested in the comic, the degree of development of the script and the good planning of the story presented, the construction and verisimilitude of the characters, the originality, the grotesque and absurd humor, and the contrast between the darkness of the plot and the luminosity of the drawing”. The author has explained that his project is located in the mid-2000s in a town in Maresme that could be his, El Masnou, where a wave of bloody crimes takes place.
Catalan version, here