GRANTA: The best young narrators in Spanish 2

Every 10 years since 1981, the century-old British magazine Granta publishes a special issue: a hand-picked selection of the most promising writers under the age of 35. Editor Valerie Miles will be with us at Capítulo Uno to talk about Granta’s second selection in Spanish, accompanied by three of the selected authors. She will discuss the selection process and the talent of this new generation of writers, putting special emphasis on the work of the three authors who have been invited to the event. They will talk about some of the trends in literature in the years to come, paying special attention to the sound qualities of the written language; the rejection of a “neutral”

Spanish in order to capture the cadences and tonalities of the different geographical and social variants of the language; the importance of humour, satire and irony; the presence of indigenous cultures and cosmologies; the commitment to social inequalities (especially those that involve children) and the denunciation of corruption and abuses of power, as well as a meditation on literature and art.

Valerie Miles (New York, 1963) is a writer, editor and translator. She co-founded Granta in 2003 while she was directing the Emecé publishing house in Spain. She contributes to The New Yorker, The New York Times, El País and The Paris Review, and her work as a translator includes such books as “Cremation” by Rafael Chirbes. She curated the exhibition “the Bolaño Archive, 1977-2003” alongside the CCCB. She is the author of the book “A Thousand Forests in One Acorn” (Duomo, 2012) and her bibliography includes 24 of Granta’s monographs in Spanish.

Paulina Flores (Santiago de Chile, 1988). Her first book, “Humiliation”, won the Roberto Bolaño Prize, the Prize of the Círculo de Críticos de Arte for Best New Writer and the Santiago Municipal Literature Prize. It was selected as one of the best books of 2016 by the El País newspaper and translated into eight languages. In 2021, she published her first novel: “Disappointment Island”.

Alejandro Morellón (Madrid, 1985) has published the collections of short stories “The Night We Fall” (2012 Monteleón Foundation Prize), “The Natural State of Things” (2017 Gabriel García Márquez Hispano-American Prize), and the novel “Horse be the Night” (Candaya, 2019).

Mónica Ojeda (Guayaquil, 1988) is the author of the novels “The Silva Disfigurement” (2014 Alba Narrative Prize), “Nefando” (Candaya, 2016) and “Jaw” (Candaya, 2018), and the collection of poems “The Stone Cycle” (Rastro de la Iguana, 2015), “History of Milk” (Candaya, 2020). She has been selected by the Hay Festival, Bogotá39 2017 and awarded the 2019 Next Generation Prize of the Prince Claus Fund.