Ferran Grau wins the Ventanas award for book of the year with 'Hiperrabia'

BarcelonaIn the early hours of December 16, 2005, three young men set fire to Rosario Endrinal, a homeless woman who was sleeping in an ATM in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood of Barcelona. When Ferran Grau (Lleida, 1982) learned about the events of the so-called ATM Crime, he realized that that same day he had walked past the ATM without noticing Endrinal. "I asked myself who was more murderous, those boys who killed her or me, who didn't see her, as if she were part of the street furniture," recalls Grau. Two decades later, Grau has won the Ventanas prize for narrative in Catalan for the best book of 2024 for Hyperrabies (Angle), the novel about that crime and its perpetrators.

The Finestres jury has valued "the daring and the degree of elaboration and literary rewriting based on two elements: a real crime and another literary text such as A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess". This mixture occurred to Grau after meeting one of the perpetrators of the crimes, whom he interviewed in 2016. "My first intention was to make a more journalistic novel, a reconstruction of the crime," explains the author. "But when remembering the events, he kept making references to "A Clockwork Orange". Inspiration struck Grau like an electric shock. "He himself was giving me the key to the novel. I hadn't read the book, and I fell in love with it. And I decided to cross the two stories, which are also very similar," he recalls.

A Hyperrabies Grau invents his own language for the perpetrators of the crime, in the image of the Newspeak of the protagonists of Burgess' novel. "First I worked with the swam, the speech that Jordi Arbonès created in his translation into Catalan of A Clockwork Orange, but I ran into two problems: copyright and, above all, the text was too robotic, so I invented the words myself." This invented speech ofHyperrabies, he xeno, is for the Finestres jury "a unique and imaginative language, playful and dark" that far from being "just a rhetorical device [...] celebrates the liveliness of the portrait of one of the urban tribes of Barcelona in the nineties and two thousands". Grau used all his references of the time: the Super 3 Club, Christmas carols, Núria Feliu, Lucky Luke, Guillermina Mota, Dragon Ball... "I was a child of leisure in the nineties, and they were from the same generation, so it suited me very well," says Grau.

The Windows of narrative in Spanish has been for an established author and regular in the Nobel pools: the Argentine Cesar Aira, who takes home the €25,000 prize for his most recent novel, In thought (Random House), a story set in a town in the Argentine Pampas where, one day, a train disappears. In its verdict, the jury highlighted "the author's playful pleasure in telling stories, the profound lightness and apparent simplicity of the prose." According to the jury, Aira's novel, experimental and playful in nature, poses "a game with the readers' intelligence through a supposed autobiographical evocation [...] before giving an unexpected twist to the story of childhood." The author, who has not traveled for some time, was unable to collect the award in person.

Social pressure for being a mother

The Ventanas de Cómic prize in Catalan, with a prize of 25,000 euros – the most important in the world of comics after the National Prize – is for the Italian cartoonist Giulia Sagramola, who has lived in Catalonia since 2016. Forwards, the graphic novel project she submitted for the award, has won over the jury "for its brilliant reflection of the social pressure to be a mother with a use of language and graphic resources that underline the emotional and economic crisis of a generation stuck in dissatisfaction." The protagonist of the comic, Elisa, is a graphic designer who would like to dedicate herself to creating typefaces and who is pressured by her family to get married and have children. "Typography is something like comics: it is complicated to do, it requires a lot of time and it is very poorly paid, but there are people who dedicate themselves for the love of letters and drawing," explains the author, who will publish Forwards with Ventanas next year.

Sagramola has collaborated in international media such as The New Yorker either The New York Times, and has two graphic novels in Italian, the autobiographical Kiss to fifth (2011) and Summer Fire (2015), still unpublished in the State, where he has published short comics in anthologies such as Blush (La Cúpula, 2015) and a good handful of fanzines. Last year Sagramola published the series Basic Catalan with Giulia, where he recounted his experiences as a student of Catalan. Although he expresses himself in Catalan, Forwards He originally wrote it in English, the language he speaks with his partner and which gives Sagramola "a distance" that made it easier for him to address "very intimate and personal issues" in the comic. In the adaptation of the story into Catalan, by the way, he was helped by Joan Ferrús, scriptwriter and former editor-in-chief ofThursday.

The elusive shadow

The special mention for Young Talent of the Finestres award, worth 15,000 euros, was won by Uxía Larrosa (A Coruña, 1993) for The detachment, about a woman who one day, on her way to work, loses her shadow. "The thing is that after losing the shadow nothing happens, your routine remains the same, and the comic is a bit of a story about that estrangement," explains the author. The shadow will return later, but with a certain disarray: "it will no longer perform its function." The jury has highlighted Larrosa's ability to "present all aspects of the monotony of life, destroy them and rediscover them by exploring the composition of the page with contemporary elegance."

Larrosa is a screenwriter forThe mermaid's kiss (La Cúpula, 2024), a comic with drawings by Luis Yang that won the Castelao graphic novel award in 2022. The detachment This is her first full-length comic as a full-fledged author, although she made her mark as a comic author in the fanzine world. In 2011 she came to Barcelona to study fine arts and stayed there for a decade, working mainly as a graphic designer. "As in Giulia's comic, in mine there is a contradiction between what is done and what is desired," she explains. "In mine it is even more extreme, because the protagonist is delighted with her routine, she wants to be that grey person; on the other hand, the shadow is bored and does not want that life." Larrosa was unable to draw The mermaid's kiss because work did not leave him time. "With The detachment I haven't had any problems, because I became unemployed," he says sarcastically.