The life of the author of ‘Las moras agraces’ (The sour blackberries), one of the most celebrated books of the ‘00s, has been cut short by cancer at the age of 38.

At 18, Carmen Jodra made her presence felt in the world of Spanish poetry with a book of great depth and astonishment, Las moras agraces. With it, she won the Hiperión Prize in 1999. In those poems of her near-adolescence, she unfurled a highly-rounded poetic art for her young age, demonstrating strong insights into classic verse. Poems of technical formality happily leapt through the air with powerful diction. She didn’t need to be overdramatic to be emphatic.

She had read Rimbaud and the classics of the Spanish Golden Age (mainly Lope de Vega and Quevedo), as well as Omar Khayyam. Las moras agraces stirred up quite a media dust storm, which didn’t seem to fit with the coy, discreet, almost intimate nature of Carmen Jodra. Her first publisher, Jesús Munárriz, recalls those days in the year 2000, when the poet from Madrid, born in 1980, watched on somewhat nervously at the hubbub which grew around her writing, and stayed so quiet. “It was a phenomenon at the time, but very much against her wishes, because Carmen was against flashiness, showiness and self-promotion.”

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