Cristina Fernández Cubas (Arenys de Mar, 1945), one of the most prominent authors of the short story genre in Spain, was awarded yesterday with the Spanish Letters 2023 national prize, which recognizes the entire literary work of a Spanish author in any of the languages of the State and which, granted by the Ministry of Culture, is endowed with 50,000 euros.
A work, that of FernándezCubas, in which the everyday and unexpected, the inexplicable and real, are mixed in attics that enclose lost worlds, in split characters, in a group of schoolchildren who comment on a painting and suddenly see something unsettling and disturbing. Stories that speak of the most hidden interiors of each person and the changes we are thrown into.
A career that the jury highlighted "that has led her to be considered one of the best Spanish storytellers" and underlined "the fascinating mastery of the use of concision to narrate stories, which are nourished by literature fantastic, and which reaches the reader in an intense way to the point of changing the way of understanding things". He also points out that the creator of the stories of Mi hermana Elba (Tusquets) "is an inescapable author who invites us to think about the limits between reality and fiction".
Fernández Cubas studied Law and Journalism in Barcelona, a profession he practised. Among his books of stories are Los altillos de Brumal (1983), El ángulo del horror (1990), Con Agatha en Estambul (1994) and Parientes pobres del diablo (2006), with which he obtained the Setenil prize for Best Book of Stories. The compilation of most of these titles, published in 2008 as Todos los cuentos (Tusquets), received the Ciutat de Barcelona for Literature in Spanish, the Salambó for Narrative in Spanish and the Càlam Book of the Year award. She is also the author of two novels – El año de Gracia (1985) and El columpio (1995)–, a play – Hermanas de sangre and a book of memoirs, of lived stories, which achieved enormous success, Things that no longer exist (2001).
The national jury included, among others, the writers Paloma Díaz-Mas, Fanny Rubio and Carme Riera, the critic José María Pozuelo Yvancos and the 2022 awardee, Luis Landero.
