Iolanda Batallé wins the Proa prize with the “intense and painful” love of a writer

Barcelona“I have confronted the person I was when I was in my early twenties, perhaps the most intense and unsettling years of my life,” says the writer Iolanda Batallé Prats (Barcelona, 1971), winner of the 8th Proa Novel Award. The winning work is titled Far from California and traces the journey into the past of Maria Viladoms, a 50-year-old writer who faces a sentimental episode from her youth that the author herself has rescued from her own autobiography. “In the text, I describe the confrontation between a mature woman and the young woman she once was, an attempt to clarify some of the lessons that life has been teaching her. These are intense and intimate pages where I have confirmed the difficulty of being honest with ourselves,” stresses Batallé. The Proa Award comes with 40,000 euros and the publication of the novel, which will arrive in bookstores on November 18th.

“Living life and knowing how to narrate it afterwards: this is the challenge that Iolanda Batallé overcomes in her short, intense, and electric novel. She proposes a metafictional game that dissolves the boundaries between love and anguish, between the voracity of living and the disillusionment of loving,” highlights the writer Xavier Pla, a member of the award jury. Pla cites writers like Virginia Woolf, Mercè Rodoreda, and Núria Bendicho as some of the names with whom Batallé’s work engages in dialogue. “It is an unforgettable story in which vitality and pain beat through memory, the body, sexual freedom, and literary creation,” says Pla, who describes the novel as “literature of the wound but also of play, of happiness, of weeping, of love, of creativity and death, of suicide attempts and the desire to live.”

The protagonist of the novel, Maria Viladoms, is a woman who gets married at 23 and then falls in love, in that order. Batallé has spent nearly four years putting her story together. “It has been very hard for me to write this text. I have reunited with the Batallé who lived with her heart on her sleeve, who made mistakes, who fled from California with a broken heart. It is not pleasant to reunite with yourself, because the fears you felt are still there, but they lay the foundations for what we achieve,” says the writer.

The story, says Batallé, delves into mental health through the protagonist's experience with her lover, Max, a man who is a cyclothymic depressive. Maria's ignorance of this pathology will lead her to react in a very specific way to the situation. "In the 90s, mental illnesses in Catalonia were largely unknown. In California, Maria earns a living as a literature professor for university students and realizes that at faculty meetings, before talking about subjects, they talk about the students' mental illnesses," points out Batallé. Regarding this issue, one of the reflections that hovers over the text is that "to one degree or another, we all suffer from mental illnesses" and that "when we live with and love a person with a severe mental illness, we end up suffering from it, too," the author underlines.

A novel about the craft of writing

One of the sentences that best summarizes the novel, points out Batallé, is that “we are all a disaster full of love”, in relation to the protagonist’s intimate life but also to her vocation. At 50 years old, Maria Viladoms writes a book titled Far from California which is the same fictionalized story about this sentimental relationship. From there, Batallé builds a meta-literary game between the protagonist and her editor, an explosive woman fed up with everything with whom she will establish a creative dialogue. This character “is almost a caricature, a burnt-out woman who works on the protagonist’s text through a professional diary”, says Batallé.

The parallels between the novel and her life are diverse. Like the protagonist, Batallé worked as a literature teacher in Los Angeles until 1998, when she returned to Catalonia. “I rejected the green card and I do not regret it at all. Now I would not want to live in the United States”, she points out. The writer also takes advantage of fiction to reflect on her craft and on the culture sector through a first-person narrative, one in third person, the editor’s diary and, even, a lecture that links the menstrual cycle with writing. “What moves us, which is the origin and the end of our work, is the love that readers feel for this discreet, patient and wonderful object that is a book”, states Batallé.

Far from California is the eighth title in Batallé’s professional career, who in 2013 won the Prudenci Bertrana award with I Will Do Everything You Want. Among her books are also The Memory of Ants (Amsterdam, 2009), with which she debuted, the essay on female leadership Dare to Do Things Your Way (Destino, 2021) and the novel Too Many Debts to the Flowers (2023), the story of a family with a shared pain. Since 2022 she has combined her work as a writer with the management of the Ona Bookstore in Barcelona. This year’s Proa award jury is made up of Xavier Pla, Mar Bosch, Anna Sáenz Mateu, Vicenç Villatoro, and Josep Lluch. The recognition was created in 2019 and, since then, it has awarded Jordi Nopca, Francesc Serés, Maite Salord, Martí Domínguez, Laura Gost, Eva Comas-Arnal, and Núria Cadenes.