Writer Pilar Adon was awarded National Storytelling Awards 2023 To About animals and birds (Galaxia Gutenberg), a novel characterized by “great originality, beauty, poetic richness and power of language,” according to the jury’s decision released this Monday. The prize, awarded by the Ministry of Culture and Sports, is worth 30,000 euros.

The jury emphasized that Adon’s novel (Madrid, 1971) is a story told that is “as fantastic as it is relatable and recognizable. The work, written in an impeccable style, sometimes bordering on lyricism, managed to immerse in one anxious atmospheresuffocating and dreamlike in appearance.”

In the same year, the storyteller, poet and translator from Madrid, founder together with Enrique Redel of the publishing house Impedimenta, received the prize Francisco Umbral Prize for Book of the Year 2022 And a prize Calamus: Another Look delivered by the Zaragoza bookstore of the same name.

‘About Animals and Birds’

Adon’s fourth novel – woman’s story, an obsessive artist devastated after the death of her sister in a traffic accident, which she survived. Plagued by survivor’s guilt and the demands and stimuli of a hyper-connected modern world, one day she decides to escape and leave it all behind. When she gets lost and runs out of gas, she finds Bethany, a utopian community made up entirely of women practicing ancestor cults, isolated from the rest of the world, surrounded by a distinctive landscape dominated by vegetation, a rock hiding the sun and a lake delineating the space of coexistence.

Adon, who wrote this novel under the influence of Tolstoy, dedicated it to his father, who died while he was writing it. This family event gave the book a new direction and pushed her to write about the presence of those who are no longer there. The Madrid writer began writing with a story. She is the author of short story collections such as Immersed Life, The cruelest month And innocent tripsand from poetry Orders, animal mind And Hunter’s Daughterall published by La Bella Varsovia.