Pamplona (EFE).- The writer Dolores Redondo Meira (San Sebastián 1969) has been chosen this Monday by the jury as the 2023 Prince of Viana Award for Culture for her undoubted figure of reference in the most recent Spanish literature and for her involvement and connection personal and professional with Navarra, “one more character” in his works. “I could never imagine that one day they would do me this honor,” the writer told Efe.
Along with Redondo, the Bilaketa association, the composer Vanessa Garde and the musician Aurelio Sagaseta were competing for the award, which will be presented in Viana on June 3.
The purpose of this prize, endowed with 20,000 euros, is to recognize the work carried out by relevant people or institutions, with special ties to Navarra, in any of the fields of culture, either through the exercise of creation, study or research, or through its promotion and encouragement.
The Minister of Culture, Rebeca Esnaola, recalled that Redondo is the fourth woman who, individually, has won the Prince of Viana, and the first writer to do so.
The projection of Baztan and Navarra throughout the world
After pointing out the quality of the four candidacies, he stressed that the winner “has been able to recover and preserve through her novels the rich cultural and patrimonial legacy of Navarre with references to cultural, landscape, tangible and intangible heritage”.
Javier Azanza, promoter of his candidacy, for his part, has valued a work that has promoted the projection of Baztan and Navarra throughout the world and with which Redondo “recovers and preserves the rich cultural, landscape, material and gastronomic legacy of the Foral Community”.
In this sense, he has alluded as the key plot of his works “the intangible heritage of Navarra, through its customs, traditions and folklore” and “the work of historical, cultural and ethnographic documentation”, thus contributing to “the generational transmission of this centuries-old legacy”, without forgetting that the writer also participates in various cultural and literary events in Navarre, among which the Pamplona Negra Literature and Film Festival stands out.
For Azanza, Dolores Redondo is also a person “fully integrated” in Navarra and who exercises “provincial activism”. Resident of Cintruénigo, Dolores Redondo, has said, “she presumes to be a cirbonera and a metope of the Foral Police” and in her work she makes a feminine claim, being a benchmark of female leadership with her presence in different forums and conferences.
A consensus candidacy
It is a “consensus candidacy that can also identify all of Navarra and that returns to Dolores on the tenth anniversary of the first book of the Baztan trilogy “some of how much she has done” for this community.
Dolores Redondo was introduced to the world of reading and writing in her adolescence, with stories and children’s stories, and after publishing her first novel in 2009, “Los Privilegios del Ángel”, in 2013 came “El guardián invisible” which, together with to “Legacy in the bones” (2013) and “Offering to the storm” (2014), forms the Baztan trilogy.
It is a literary phenomenon that mixes the thriller, the noir and the fantastic genre, translated into 39 languages and read by more than two and a half million people and that between 2017 and 2020 made it to the cinema under the direction of Fernando González Molina from Pamplona.
In 2016, La Redondo won the Premio Planeta for “All this I will give you”, an award to which 552 works aspired; In 2019 she returned to the Navarrese stage with “The North Face of the Heart”, the prequel to the trilogy, which is currently being adapted to the serial format in the United States; and in 2022 she published “Waiting for the flood”, her most recent novel.
Redondo: “A wonderful surprise”
Minutes after receiving the news of the award, “still very excited”, Redondo recalled in statements to EFE that when Javier Azanza informed him that he was a candidate, he was “a wonderful surprise” because “he did not even know that someone not born in Navarra could opt for ” to this award.
In fact, when I announced today that she had won, she felt “surprised” again, unlike what happened to her when the Planet won in 2016, “she had never dreamed of this and that was a dream since she was little, something she had always wanted since I knew I wanted to be a writer.
And she added that she feels “very happy” because the Prince of Viana Award is for her “one of those wonderful things that come to you in life without waiting for them and without even believing that you can choose, that you can be a candidate”, and, furthermore, She is proud to have shared a candidacy with the Bilaketa association, the composer Vanessa Garde and the musician Aurelio Sagaseta, “so deserving (of this award) or even more deserving than me”.
For this reason, she says, last night “I took it for granted that I would not” be chosen, “that the honor had been to be part of this exclusive list”, so upon learning of the jury’s decision “it was a moment of tears”. .
Grateful for the shows of support
After pointing out that it is “wonderful that good news and beautiful things arrive”, Dolores Redondo has also expressed her satisfaction with the calls and messages she is receiving from people who are also pleased that good things happen and share beautiful things “, for everything which has been “grateful”.
She is also grateful to Azanza not only for being the promoter of her candidacy but “for the laudatory things” he has said about her and her work, including the vision she gives “not of feminism” but of “traditional Navarrese matriarchy”. and Basque” in the absence of the men, “mandatory because they worked outside the home and it was the women who had to join and support their families”.
“It is the readers who have to enjoy it”
“Something that they did not do for any vindictive desire but because they had no other choice,” he specified, adding that for this reason “in all my novels there is a tribute to these people, men and women, who every day do what must be done.” do. Something that I will always honor.”
Now he waits until June 3 when he will receive the award in Viana, an act that forces him to “move the entire agenda” because that day he planned to be in Bilbao where a part of “Waiting for the flood” takes place, his latest novel now in phase of promotion and with which “I go back to the road” after Easter with the arrival of Book Day.
“I will be in a lot of fairs and events and if I am not in more it is because there are no days off, but I am also writing. I am always writing ”, Redondo assures, although he does not want to tell anything about the new project that he has in hand.
With all the books “I keep a lot to myself because my readers also want it that way, they expect it to be a surprise to enjoy from the moment of publication”, he points out, and points out that “it is the readers who have to enjoy it”.