The Colombian writer Pilar Quintana (Cali, 49 years old) has been awarded the 24th Alfaguara Novel Prize, endowed with 175,000 dollars (145,000 euros, approximately) and a sculpture by Martín Chirino, for the work The abysses, presented with the same title and under the pseudonym of Claudia de Colombia.

The abysses is the fifth novel by this author, who was already a finalist for the National Book Award 2020 for The dog (Random House Literature), a short and intense novel in which deep violence and extreme beauty go hand in hand.

This book also has violence, intimate, subtle, according to the author herself, and a portrait of the lives of several generations of women. “There is a time before being a mother and another after. I was a mother at 43 and motherhood opened a very new literary wealth. And everything that happens to me I turn into fiction. There are many literary abysses to which I still look out ”, he replies when asked about the title of the novel and the abysses that he still has to face.

Read more: Pledge Times