The social educator Maria Arimany Almirón has won the Documenta 2023 award with the work Al bosc si ha ha arrivar cuan está está dark, a compilation of stories with a “very powerful” short novel at the center, according to what has been made public this Friday the jury, made up of Anna Punsoda, Roser Cabré-Verdiell, Pau Vidal, Josep Cots and Eugènia Broggi, which has agreed to distinguish the work for its “literary ambition and a careful style”, as well as for “the magic that maintains in all the stories and the imaginative, disturbing and deeply believable construction of sentimental revenge”. In the previous edition, the prize was declared deserted.
All of this makes it “a very interesting and vibrant proposal” with a “living language” to explain stories about heartbreak, desire, balance or imbalance, anger and conformism, “relationships that don’t quite work and “the life that escapes us.”
The winner indicated this Friday that writing helps her “organize myself and understand what is happening to me.” Likewise, she has revealed that she applied to Documenta with the intention of “shaping part of the material I was writing and I chose it because L’ Altra Editorial is one of my reference publishers.”
With the stories he has presented he wants to “talk about what scares us, about the doubt and uncertainty, about the impulse, the rage and the resignation that we carry inside and that sometimes cannot be seen if we do not scratch where it touches.” Entering the interior of the protagonists, he continued, has been like “entering a forest, which can seem like a landscape, a static and impermeable place, a photograph, although when you get closer and look at it from the inside you realize that the “change is constant, that movement is everywhere and at all times.”
Born in 1990 in Llerona (centre of Les Franqueses del Vallès), Maria Arimany is a trained social educator and works in the field of social services. He currently lives in Breda (La Selva) and studies Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Barcelona.
A lifelong reader, she trained at the Ateneu Barcelonès writing school between 2016 and 2019, and in 2020 she won her first prize in the El 9 Nou newspaper’s short fiction contest, with the story Mar de formigues.
Organized by the Documenta bookshop since 1980, and jointly with L’Altra Editorial since 2012, the Documenta prize recognizes unpublished works by authors under 35 years old, with a list that in recent years includes names such as Xavier Mas Craviotto, Irene Solà, Jordi Amor, Alicia Kopf, Jordi Nopca, Yannick Garcia, Irene Pujadas, Laia Viñas and Pilar Codony.
The winning work will be published in L’Altra Editorial at the beginning of March 2024.
