Camila Sosa, author of 'Las malas'.
"Being a transvestite is a party," proclaims Aunt Encarna in
Las malas
, the novel with which Argentine Camila Sosa Villada received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz award.
A party that has granted this writer, actress and playwright the award given by the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) to literature written by women.
Straddling the fairy tale and horror, Sosa Villada narrates the disappointment of a group of transvestites who prostitute themselves in a park in Córdoba (Argentina), but also the networks of care and friendship that they weave between them.
"The bad is fiction and reality worked in the molcajete of the trade and inspiration," says the minutes of the jury, made up of Ana García Bergua and Ave Barrera, from Mexico, and Daniel Centeno Maldonado, from Venezuela.
"Its text is rough and at the same time beautiful, this strange balance makes it an outstanding work, full of lyricism, rage and redemption," adds the unanimous verdict on the winning novel that was chosen among 67 nominations from Argentina, Chile, Colombia , Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.
The writer, born in 1982 in the Cordovan town of La Falda, describes
Las malas
as “a hymn to transvestism, how I experienced my own transvestism, how I felt that my parents took it, how I felt that the town from where I was taking it I was".
The novel draws on the world that Sosa Villada met when he went to college to study Communication during the day and began to frequent Sarmiento Park at night, at that time one of the red zones of Córdoba, Argentina's second city.
"I remember when I went to the first boarding house in Córdoba and I had to show that it was not bad, because they saw us as dangerous transvestite girls," he told days ago at the last International Literature Festival of Buenos Aires (Filba) about the origin of the title of the novel.
“Thank you my loves, loves and loves.
I send them divine kisses and let them be touched by the transvestite mystery, "wrote Sosa Villada through social networks upon learning of the $ 10,000 award.
The success of
Las malas
(Tusquets, 2019), one of the novels of the year in Argentina, catapulted Sosa Villada as one of the most original voices in River Plate literature.
His book of poetry
La novia de Sandro
, published for the first time by Caballo Negro in 2015, was
reissued
and his autobiographical essay
El viaje inutil
(Ediciones DocumentA / Escénicas, 2018)
was also rediscovered
.
Sosa Villada maintains a parallel facet as an actress and playwright since in 2009 she premiered her first show,
Carnes tolendas
.
The last one took place months ago, shortly after the start of the covid-19 pandemic, when he was one of the voices in the WhatsApp play
Love in Quarantine
.