The Cervantes Prize, the most important award in Hispanic Literature, has gone to Cristina Fernández Cubas, a narrator from Barcelona, author of a work based on short stories, often magical but also precise. Cubas succeeds the Mexican Gonzalo Celorio in the honors list and is the sixth woman to receive the award since 1976.
All the Stories (Tusquets, 2008), the compilation that brought together the first five books of stories by Fernández Cubas, was the first milestone that drew mass attention to the author's work. There were 21 stories written as miniatures and united by a feeling of instability, for ambiguously portraying the morality and verisimilitude of their characters. In the texts of Fernández Cubas, what seemed true ended up being swampy and the characters with whom it was easy to empathize ended up being the most disturbing.
"And it was like this from my first book," Fernández Cubas told EL MUNDO in 2023, after receiving the National Literature Award. "A few years ago we republished it and I recognized myself perfectly in it... It was called My Sister Elba and it appeared in 1980 in a collection of little silver books that Tusquets published. Tusquets was not at that time the large publishing house that it is today, it was a small imprint and my expectations were also small. I wrote short stories, which was not a genre that had many readers. I thought I would connect with 100 people, with 200... But my editor, Beatriz de Moura, believed in me and I found a way. Over the years, everything has become more complicated, although I try not to let it show too much.
Is there a common thread among the 10 narrative titles that Fernández Cubas has published? "Of course. There are many things that have never changed. The concern for language, the obsessive search for precision, for finding the word that most accurately names things," said the author in 20230. "The concerns are also the same. My stories talk about everyday situations in which something suddenly appears and breaks with what seemed stable. And there are also the spaces, which are made of chiaroscuros, of confusing situations between memory and sleep."
Attics, abandoned houses, childhood memories... The classic settings of fantasy literature. "I do not consider myself a fantasy writer but it is true that the unnameable, the fantastic, appears and flirts with what I write. And the reason is that I believe in what I see and what I do not see, because what I do not see does not have to exist because I do not see it," said the author in an interview published by EL MUNDO in 2016.
Nona's room, (Tusquets, 2015), expanded its prestige and associated Fernández Cubas' gaze with family relationships and the abyss of childhood. In the story that gave the book its title, a girl noticed her sister, Nona, first out of jealousy for her brilliance. Then, from the anguish over the way Nona closed herself off. And, in the end, from strangeness. At that time, a new generation of short story authors arrived in bookstores, Spanish and Latin American women who were around 30 years old at the time and who were often united by an imminent terror and a very precise sense of the short story. For all of them, Fernández Cubas was a pioneer.
"My stories are timeless, often the locations are imprecise. I see myself as a timeless writer, but not by much. In reality, the fantastic also serves to reflect on the human condition, which is timeless," says the writer. "I suppose my intimates will tell you that I am in my world and that this is also noticeable in my books."
Fernández Cubas is also the author of three novels and a memoir, among other works.
