Sofía Balbuena Wins the Ribera del Duero Prize and Talks About Women's Inner Torment
The Ribera del Duero Prize for short fiction, which carries €50,000 and tends to reward work that takes the form seriously rather than treating it as a consolation prize for novelists, has gone this year to Sofía Balbuena. The announcement was made last week; the interview that followed was more interesting than the announcement.
Balbuena, in conversation with El Cultural, spoke about the women she writes about in terms that resist the usual therapeutic vocabulary. She describes them as women who project outward the inferno within — which is a formulation that suggests something more vertiginous than psychological realism. The image is of pressure, of containment, of a self that cannot be entirely housed in the available social structures. Which is, if you think about it, the subject of a fair amount of the best fiction being written by women in Spain right now.
The short story is having a sustained moment in Spanish letters that tends to go underreported in Britain. The form suits something in the literary culture — an interest in compression, in the moment of crisis rather than its long unfolding, in what can be left unsaid. Balbuena, from what one can gather, is a practitioner of exactly this kind of negative space.
Whether the prize will bring her work to readers outside Spain is the usual question about Spanish-language prizes. The Ribera del Duero has a better record than most. The next question is whether anyone will translate her. That is always the quieter, more consequential bet.
