translated from Spanish: Alejandra Costamagna is the finalist of the premio Herralde novel 2018

the Anagrama Publishing House gave to c onocer this Monday the results of 36 ° version of the Herralde novel Prize, which resulted as winning the Spanish Cristina Morales with his novel “Easy reading” and as a finalist the Chilean Alejandra Costamagna with his book “The touch system”.
On this occasion, the jury was composed by Rafael Arias (library lyrics Corsarias, Salamanca), Gonzalo pontoon Gijón, Marta Sanz, Juan Pablo Villalobos and the editor Silvia Sesé, who selected 7 novels of the presented, in the contest with 445 with 18,000 euros.
“Among the selected novels were”Cristatus”, Cor Hilkema (pseudonym, Argentina),”Degenerated”, Ariana Harwicz (Argentina),”The higher men”, from Fabián Martínez Siccardi (Argentina),”Path”, Silvan Salas (pseudonym, Spain) and” A House with a garden”, Itzel Guevara (Mexico).
Moral stories tells the story of four women with varying degrees of intellectual disability, which are raw and a supervised apartment. Live without complexes their freedom and sexuality, in a Barcelona mestizo, hinting at the prevailing machismo and the stigma that there is against people with disabilities. It’s a visceral portrait of contemporary society, which confirms to Morales as a strong voice and innovative of contemporary Spanish literature.
Furthermore, in “The touch system”, Costamagna has as protagonist to Ania, who must go on behalf of the family to say goodbye to a guy about to die. So embarks on a thousand five hundred kilometre journey, that will be an escape from the present and a shift towards memory. It is a novel about the uprootedness and belonging, on Chile and Argentina, about family and absences.
Since the seventies of the 20th century up to the first decades of the 21st with jumps to an even more distant past, the protagonists of the system’s touch will be experiencing the agony of their roots and the sensation of seeing as foreigners in the places where they live.
But it is not only geographical territories, but also of families, affections, and languages that have to share. Ania and Augustine, reflected: Ania and increasingly distant father at his Chilean-Argentine immigration; Augustine and a mother plunged into forgetting, and since its origin Piedmont historical trauma.
Career and accolades previously Costamagna had published in a low voice (1996, prize games literary Gabriela Mistral), citizen in retirement (1998), already tired of the Sun (2003) and tell him that I am not (2007, finalist for the Planeta-Casa de America Prize and prize of the) Art Critics Circle), the long tale (2010) still lifes, storybooks bad nights (2000), recent fires (2005, Premio Altazor), pets (2011), there was once a bird (2013) and impossible out of the Earth (2016), among others titles.
He has written for the magazines Letras Libres, Gatopardo and El Malpensante, among other means. In 2003 he received the Fellowship of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, United States. In 2008 he received in Germany the Anna Seghers Prize for literature.
“Alejandra Costamagna has been consolidated as one of the most interesting voices of Latin American narrative,” he said at its Herson Barona, of Letras Libres.
“Alejandra Costamagna characters have that air of truth that leads to that famous and pleasant confusion, the genuine miracle of literature: what happens when life seems to be on the side of the book.” When the characters seem so real that during a long and valuable second us again, with the book in hand, less real,’ said, for his part, his colleague Alejandro Zambra, while the own Bolaño had sentenced that “there is a generation of” writers (Chilean) that promises to eat it all. Head, clearly, are two. These are Lina Meruane and Alejandra Costamagna”.
Prize Herralde meets since 1983, to encourage and promote the new Spanish and Latin American narrative. In previous versions of this contest wild detectives have been awarded, among other titles, (1998, Roberto Bolaño), mal de Montano, (2002, Enrique Vila-Matas), past (2003, Alan Pauls), sudden death (2013, Álvaro Enrigue) and show business (2015, Marta Sanz).

Original source in Spanish