Cynthia Rimsky and Xita Rubert, winners of the Herralde Prize with the novels ‘Clara y confusing’ and ‘The facts of Key Biscayne’

The Chilean writer, based in Argentina, Cynthia Rimsky and the Barcelonan Chita Rubert They won this Monday on an equal footing the 42nd edition of the Herralde Novel Prize, organized by the Anagrama publishing house and endowed with 25,000 euros, with their respective works clear and confusing y The Key Biscayne Facts.

The jury was made up of Aldo García from the Antonio Machado bookstore in Madrid; the professor of Philology at the University of Girona Gonzalo Pontón Gijón; the writers Marta Sanz and Juan Pablo Villalobos and the editor Silvia Sesé, have proclaimed the winners of the two novels that went to the final deliberations of the seven finalists that had been selected among the 1,149 works submitted for the award.

Cynthia Rimsky had entered the contest under the pseudonym South Seaand Xita Rubert had competed with the fictitious title I am a crocodile hiding his name with the pseudonym Sofia Sorensen.

In The Key Biscayne FactsAccording to Villalobos, “hilarious and quirky characters” appear while in clear and confusing the reader attends “a performance of love, with the trials, the doubts that the loved one has, the uncertainty and, at the same time, it offers a parody on art, converted into a commodity, detached from its mysterious character, and it is also a text about corruption in the world of art, institutions that are dying in Latin America, with their large buildings almost empty.

For Villalobos, These are “two novels that open paths for how writing can be done in the future.”

The protagonists of clear and confusing They are an unconventional plumber who He listens to the sounds of water on the walls to detect “phantom leaks, because there is no trace of humidity” and a conceptual artist with whom he falls in love.

In the presentation of the ruling, Cynthia Rimsky has argued why she chose the world of plumbers: “Simply because I was doing work in my house, and There was a very handsome one and I decided to make him the protagonist of the novel and I made him fall in love with a visual artist.”.

The author wanted to raise several questions such as “What is art? What is its mission? How can we give meaning to life? What is love? Is what happens to us the result of destiny or chance? “Is there logic in chance?”

Rimsky is a professor at the National University of the Arts of Buenos Aires and a graduate in Writing from the Universidad Católica Valparaíso..

He has published the books Remaining post, Someone else’s novel, The perplexed, Extension, The future is a strange place, I went, At work, The fingertip revolution, The return to the dog y Yomuri.

He has received the Gabriela Mistral Literary Games Award in 1994, the Santiago Municipal Award in 2001 for Remaining postin 2017 by The future is a strange place and in 2021 by The fingertip revolution; the Best Literary Work Award from the National Council of Culture in Chile in 2017 for The future is a strange place and the Award for Best Literary Work from the National Council of Culture in 2023 for the novel Yomuri.

In the case of Xita Rubert, The Key Biscayne Facts It is a novel that has been assaulting him over the years, starring “an unconventional family, with a father who receives custody of the children and decides to go with them to Miami.”

Rubert has pointed out that “although it could be considered a false crime novel, it is a layered novel with a plot, but the most beautiful and murky thing is what happens beneath that plot” and He confesses that he is fascinated by “those narrators who say and don’t say, who are not completely reliable.”

Xita Rubert discovered in the writing process that it was fun for her to “make a social portrait of people who live on the margins of reality.”

Rubert (Barcelona, ​​1996) studied Philosophy and Literature in England and his first novel, My days with the Kopps (Anagrama, 2022), was selected among the best books of the year by the main Spanish media, was a finalist for the Premier Roman de Chambéry award and has been translated into German and Portuguese.

Rubert has received awards for theater and short stories in Spanish and his stories have appeared in media such as The Country, The Cultural o Hispanic American Notebooks and in magazines in the United States and Brazil. She is currently a doctoral researcher and professor at Princeton University.

Both novels, the editor Silvia Sesé has announced, will be in bookstores on November 27, and the literary party that was scheduled this Monday night has been postponed due to the tragedy caused by the dana.