Men who hide a corpse and girls who want to become a fern

BarcelonaFew literary awards can boast a 45-year history like Documenta. "Our goal continues to be to find voices that are forward-looking proposals to enrich the Catalan literary scene," says Èric del Arco, who has been a member of the the Documenta bookstore promotes the award, along with La Otra Editorial. This year, and unintentionally, the jury ended up awarding two works instead of one: The screams, second novel by Víctor Recort, and A black cat in the garden, Irene Zurrón's short story debut.

Both authors assure that they brought their books on the last day of the call. "The only thing I didn't like was having to share the money," says Recort with a smile that Zurrón knows how to infect. Endowed with 5,000 euros –which this year will be 2,500 euros for each author–, the Documenta has only been shared on two previous occasions: the first was in 1998, by Sebastià Alzamora and Vicenç Pagès Jordà; the second, in 2020, byIrene Pujadas and Laia Viñas.

Víctor Recort (Sant Boi de Llobregat, 1990) tries to find time to write when he's not working at the Finestres bookstore –where he programs events almost every day– and when his two children allow him. "My books are always short because I don't have much time," he admits. Shortly after debuting with Game Boy (Caballo de Troya, 2019), Recort decided to stop writing in Spanish for personal and political reasons. "I'm not making a charniega claim or any nonsense of that kind," he says. His first novel, Airlift (Empúries, 2022), focused on the linguistic issue based on the reunion of two actors who had shared a sitcom successful decades ago. Television has also inspired the author again in The screams: The characters are a television presenter and two of the panelists who collaborate. "The phrase that sums up the novel would be this: three men must hide the body of a woman to maintain the reputation of one of them," he explains. "If we were to spin it a little more narrowly, we could say that the book is an elongated opinion column, because the protagonist is a columnist and panelist who, furthermore, is a father." Recort advances that the novel also thematizes how the generation of men to which he belongs "still depends too much on elements of childhood such as superheroes, video games or running competitive". Behind this nostalgia mixed with the impossibility of growing up there is "an enormous fear of the bond".

The villages are not as idyllic as they seem

Irene Zurrón (Palma, 1990) debuts as a short story writer with A black cat in the garden, but has previously published the children's novel The tribe in the middle of the mountain (Tándem, 2021) and has dedicated his doctoral thesis, Taking root in a crack, to suicide in the narrative of Mercè Rodoreda. One of the eight stories in the book with which he received ex aequo Documenta starts precisely from a novel by Rodoreda. "If in How much, how much war "The protagonist wants to be a plant to avoid having to make decisions. In one of my stories, there's a girl who wants to become a fern," he says. "As my story takes place in Mallorca, instead of becoming a plant, that girl ends up working in a souvenir shop." In another story, Turtle shell, "a woman who hasn't been together long becomes obsessed because an old sex tape she appears in could spread."

Although Irene Zurrón has lived in Barcelona for seven years, where she is currently struggling to secure a permanent position at the public university – "It's difficult and exhausting," she admits – many of the stories are set in small towns. "Nowadays, there's a certain idealization of the natural world," says the author. "It seems that returning to live in a village means reconnecting with your roots in an idyllic setting. In villages, the dynamics can be very perverse." Irene Zurrón speaks about this with elaborate, detailed prose, often imbued with lyricism.