Gabriela Cabezón, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 2024 award, announced the FIL

The Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (San Isidro, 1968) was awarded the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize 2024 at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL).

The jury decided to award the award to the narrator for her novel The girls of the orange tree, that, with richness and literary diversity, the author manages to provide new imaginative and symbolic force to the historical novel that recounts the speeches and violence that took place in the New World.according to a statement.

The title published in Mexico by Literatura Random House fictionalizes the life of Catalina de Erauso, a nun who was also an ensign (lower-ranking military officer) during the Colony.

The award ceremony will take place on Wednesday, December 4, at the 38th edition of the FIL Guadalajara.

The award committee also noted that The novel dynamites the well-known story that is written from the experience of the virile by incorporating a voice that pays attention to the sensuality and hostility of the landscape, the ambitions and fears of the characters, as well as the corruption of the bodies that, without prejudice, Cabezón Cámara describes directly and masterfully..

Cabezón Cámara, in a previous interview with The Day, mentioned that he considers writing a way of making music. Words have sound, and when we speak, we put together tonal figures, rhythms, and melodic lines. I really like to work with that to feel that a text I am writing is alive, I have to feel the music. In all my novels you find that.

On The girls of the orange tree, The novelist explained that she explores what elements of the colonial era reverberate in the present and how much of the cruelty of the Conquest continues to operate; at the same time, how the tenderness and strength of our land can profoundly transform us.

After a life of violence, the Ensign Nun He reflects and writes a letter to his aunt, prioress of the convent from which he fled, to tell her about 30 years of his life. For the first time, the environment in which he is begins to affect him, because until then he only saw Spain where he went. The guy was part of that colonial European worldview that only we exist and what is not us we annihilate (The Day, 24/1/24).

Gabriela Cabezón is a writer and activist who graduated in literature from the University of Buenos Aires and collaborates with media outlets such as Página12, The Diplomatic World y Clarion.

This year he also won the Ciutat de Barcelona Prize for Literature in the Spanish language for The girls of the orange tree.