Hostage and Queen of the Visigoths. Daughter, wife and mother of emperors and even regent of the Roman Empire. Little is known about Gall·la Placídia, despite the fact that one of the best-known squares in Barcelona, ??between the districts of Gràcia and Sant Gervasi, bears her name. Roberto Corral (Madrid, 1961) has proposed to recover his figure in his book Gala de Hispania, reina y esclava, which yesterday won the seventh edition of the Edhasa Narratives Històriques prize, endowed with 10,000 euros, and which can now be find in bookstores. The Madrid writer takes over from José Zoilo, who won last year with La frontera de piedra, a novel that was also set at the beginning of Rome’s decline.
“My wife Lourdes is the artist that I am here because for a long time I spoke to her about Galla. I did it with such passion that it encouraged me to choose this topic to write about and not others that I had in the drawer of the bedside table”, thanked the award winner, who admits that he has always been interested in this historical period. “We men like the Roman Empire and The Godfather,” he joked.
Of Gal·la, Corral emphasizes that she is “a woman with an incredible personality and dignity” and that “she knew how to carry them in her saddest moments”. Some of these more intense periods were lived in Bàrcino, today’s Barcelona, ??since “it was here that her son died shortly after birth, her husband was murdered and she became a slave”. Some facts that many do not know, since, “despite the importance and weight it had in history, there is not much documentation about it”, which has allowed him to “fictionalize some passages”.
The starting point is a scene with Galla Placídia on her deathbed accompanied by two slaves, Helpídia and Maia, in charge of telling the story of a woman as applauded as she was vexed, who took the reins of government in a moment of economic, political and social crisis and which became, more than once, a bargaining chip to obtain peace treaties.
The jury, composed of the writers Carlos García Gual and María José Solano, the journalists Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, Jacinto Antón, Mari Pau Domínguez, and with the editor Daniel Fernández as president, emphasized that it is “an agile, A well-documented account that reflects the changing times and fortunes, not only of the historical figure of Élia Galla Placídia, but of everything that the Western Roman Empire had meant”.
The Madrid author delves into the turbulent years before his fall. Specifically in the fifth century, “a key moment when the empire splits in two, surrounded by dozens of barbarian tribes, which will end up shaping what Europe will be, and when the Church also seems to be about to disappear with the irruption of Arianism”.
This is the first historical novel that Corral tackles and he does it through the big door. He made his narrative debut with the children’s story Gulo, the anorexic elephant (2013). “My father had Alzheimer’s and I started writing to find a way to explain it to my daughter.”
Then came the novels La ruta de los huesos (2018), set in the former Soviet Union, and El olor de las olas (2020), a finalist for the Nadal prize. Graduated in Art History, he has dedicated a large part of his professional life to the training of adults and currently directs a Spanish school for foreigners.
