Argentine writer Leticia Martin won the Lumen Novel Award

With a novel that can be read as a gender reversal of the famous “Lolita” of Vladimir Nabokovthe Argentine writer Leticia Martin was the winner of Lumen Award novel, a distinction that the Spanish publisher Esther Tusquets created to give prominence to literature written by women and that now returns almost 25 years after its last edition.

“The attraction and seduction of a mature man towards a young woman has been represented many times in literature, but the desire of a mature woman towards a young man, has not. ‘Vladimir’ bets on a reading of ‘Lolita’ in a feminine key in the context of a world that is going out”, says the decision of the jury, made up of the writers Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde, michael moon and clear boundas well as by Lola Larumbedirector of the Rafel Alberti Bookstore in Madrid, and Mary Fasceliterary director of Lumen

Martín, narrator, poet and cultural critic, will win 30,000 euros and the publication throughout the Spanish-speaking territory of her novel, which the jury also characterized as a “controversial work on the limits of desire and the relations of can”.

He Lumen Novel Award resumes the initiative that the label founded in 1960 by Esther Tusquets created to make visible the literature written by women. It was called for the first time in 1994 and had regular editions until 1999.

With an indication of his claim housed in the same title, which reproduces the first name of the author of “Lolita”, the work is presented as a reversal of the controversial perspective raised by the Russian narrator in the story that narrates the romance of a veteran teacher with a 12-year-old girl who is also his stepdaughter.

What is Leticia Martin’s novel, winner of the Lumen Award, about?

In this case, in the novel that was defined as an emotional and erotic thriller that straddles between dystopia and adventure novel, a woman named Guinea must interrupt her career as a university professor after discovering her relationship with a student much younger than her. . The protagonist then arrives in Buenos Aires in search of a new life, but she finds herself in an almost apocalyptic landscape in which the city is in the dark due to a blackout that has left the city without electricity and without a telephone network. In this context, she meets Vladimir, a teenager with whom she develops a great complicity.

Martin (Buenos Aires, 1975) is a storyteller, poet and cultural critic, author of the essay “Feminisms” and of the novels “Taste”, “Rusty Bulldozers”, “A New Noise” and “estrogens”a novel where, as in the brand new winner of the Lumen Award, it builds a futuristic plot with also disrupted gender relations, in this case with men who are capable of gestating and giving birth as women do.

The narrator is also the author of an extensive series of poetry books and is about to publish the volume of short stories titled “Everything that is not a mouth in my body”.

For this first edition of the Lumen Novel Award, 407 manuscripts from different countries have been received: Argentina (33), Colombia (23), Chile (10), Spain (272), United States (18), Mexico (37) , Peru (7) and Uruguay (7).