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A text starring Don Quixote and Sancho and set in the Sahel is the winner of Purorrelato
15/07/2016
The micro-fiction story which has won the fourth Casa África Purorrelato contest is now known: it’s called En un lugar del Sahel (In a place in the Sahel) by a young Spanish writer based in Málaga, who used the pseudonym Nendo Dango. Completing the trio of winners in this literary contest are two other texts by Spanish authors: Monstruos (Monsters), a work signed by Isidro Catela, and Kabwe, signed with the pseudonym Lumumba. These three micro-fiction stories stood out among the 617 presented to this literary event by 405 participants from nearly forty countries, including Nigeria, Togo, Niger, Malta, Cape Verde and Latin American countries. Most are written in Spanish, but eleven are in French, six in English and five in Portuguese.
The jury highlighted that the winning text is well constructed and that it was ingenious to put Don Quixote in Timbuktu, while calling it a text “with grace and rhythm and an element of the unexpected.”
In the second, Monstruos (Monsters), the jury valued the touch of magic and the fantasy which give an image of hope to the terrible reality of immigrants crossing the Strait, and also valued the powerful poetic images. The third was considered to be “a great collection of stories which tells us of a journey through eras and worlds, speaks of the influence of Africa on Western artistic trends, of the sustained pillaging of Africa and of the concept of art in the West and in Africa”.
The members of the jury were Gustau Nerín (writer and anthropologist), Sonia Iruela (librarian and coordinator of several book clubs), Javier G. G. Mamely (professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), Juan Ramón Tramunt (writer and retired professor), Ángeles Jurado (journalist and writer) and Estefanía Calcines (head of Casa África’s Media Library and Web department).
Casa África will publish an e-book with the three winning stories and a selection of those submitted to the contest, up to a total of 50 texts, as well as micro-fiction from African and Spanish guest authors.
