Xita Rubert and Cynthia Rimsky win the Herralde Prize

BarcelonaThroughout its 42-year history, the Herralde Novel Prize – worth 25,000 euros – has only been shared once. We have to go back to 1994 to find two winners, Pedro Zarraluki and Carlos Perellón. Three decades later they have been Chita Rubert and Cynthia Rimsky were chosen by the jury to share, ex aequo, the flagship award of the Anagrama publishing house, with the novels Key Biscayne Facts and Clear and confusing,two novels that "stand out for their eccentricity, for their risk and for going beyond the obvious," said the writer Juan Pablo Villalobos on behalf of the jury.

A Key Biscayne Facts, Barcelona native Xita Rubert, who at 28 years old is one of the youngest winners of the list of winners, revisits "the love of the teenage daughter for a father, a teacher, a cultured man, from adulthood," she comments. Marta Sanz, also a member of the jury. The exoticism and the papier-mâché of a story in Florida hide the darkness of a story of violence, sweet and terrifying, that all women have experienced." Among the themes of the novel, the second one published by Xita Rubert –she debuted in 2022 with My days with the Kopps, published by Anagrama, and is currently a doctoral researcher and professor at Princeton University – there are memory, dislocation, puberty disorders and the limits that separate the figure of an exceptional father from the lover. Rubert is the daughter of the philosopher Xavier Rubert de Ventós (1939-2023) and the writer Luisa Castro (1966).

"I had this novel inside me for a long time," explained Rubert. "From the title it seems like a detective story, but instead it is a story of layers, in which both the most beautiful and the most shady things go under the plot. I like writers who show a little leg but hide the rest." The author of Key Biscayne Facts He says he had fun "doing a social satire" about "those people who live on the fringes of reality and hover over it as if they were floating." The North American island of Key Biscayne, where the characters end up when the father takes his children after his divorce, is full ofexpanded and confusion. "When things don't seem clear it's because there are many physical and emotional phenomena happening at the same time, and each reader will have to decide what conclusions to reach," Xita Rubert added. "I like stories about adorable villains and seductive criminals, but also about how these can affect children."

Art, love and dependence

Cynthia Rimsky, an author born in Santiago de Chile in 1962 but living in Argentina, has been the second winner of the 42nd Herralde Prize with Clear and confusingIt begins when a plumber returning home passes in front of a cultural centre and sees how the conceptual artist who is exhibiting a selection of his paintings takes down one and performs an unusual action on it. Thus begins a story of love and dependence with a touch of torture, which questions the meaning of art and love in our present. "It is difficult for me to talk about the plot of a novel, because I myself do not yet know what it is about," Rimsky has admitted. "It all began as a gesture of anger towards my Argentine editor, who harshly criticised the book I had brought him. This and the fact of having lived with several plumbers during the last year, because I was building a house, have been the driving forces behind this novel." Clear and confusing".

Rimsky made his debut in 2001 with the novel Post Remaining, and has since published books, often combining travelogue, autobiography and essay. "Each of my books starts with the exploration of a theme, be it lies, ambiguity or creation, and in the case of Clear and confusing "It was the doubt," said Rimsky, who also defended "the path of imagination" when writing novels, a tendency now "disdained beneath major themes such as environmentalism, feminism or migration."