In the pandemic, female voices gave another face to world literature

Four years after the start of the covid-19 pandemic, the world of literature shows a different look. Above all, the leadership of the authors in the narration of reality was consolidated through a work with a variety of themes and literary styles; In addition, there was the emergence of exponents in the poetry genre.

In Mexico, this Saturday it is remembered that in 2020, on this same date, the confinement began, called National Healthy Distance Day.

During those moments in which the health emergency was faced, in the international field of literature, with the designation of the Nobel Prizes in Literature for the years 2020 to 2023, for the first time a sign of equity arrived with the unprecedented award to the same number of men and women in that period: in chronological order they were awarded to the American Louise Glück, the Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah, the French Annie Ernaux and the Norwegian Jon Fosse.

Even in confinement, the impulse of the writers became evident. The plethora of poets, novelists and short story writers who marked his value is almost endless.

In this regard, Ernaux considered in his 2022 Nobel reception speech that this award was a collective victoryshared with those They aspire to greater freedom, equality and dignity for all human beings, regardless of their sex or gender, the color of their skin and their culture..

The novelist then remembered her youthful promise to avenge my people. He added that also from “my ancestors, hard-working men and women accustomed to tasks that made them die early, I received enough strength and rage to have the desire and ambition to give them a place in literature.

“I had to break with ‘writing well’ and with beautiful phrases – the same ones I taught my students to write – to unearth, show and understand the crack that was going through me. What came to me spontaneously was the clamor of a language that transmitted rage and mockery, even crudeness; a language of excess, insurgent, often used by the humiliated and offended as the only response to the memory of the contempt of others, of shame and the shame of feeling shame.”

Even so, Ernaux criticized that the Nobel Prize is an institution for menwhich is He sees in the taste for a tradition, that of costumes. It seems to me that attachment to traditions is perhaps more masculine; Deep down, power is transmitted in that way..

Since 2020, the poetic genre written by women has experienced a boom when its exponents were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Louise Glück and the Princess of Asturias to Anne Carson.

The poet Ana Luísa Amaral, 2021 Reina Sofía Poetry Prize winner, commented in an interview that the genre she develops mixes memory, what can be and what is. What can be is what is and what was is what will be. For this reason, poetry messes, and that is very good, because an ordered society is terrible. Poetry messes up to try to offer a small order.

That year, the Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi won the Cervantes Prize for Literature; the Argentine actress and novelist Camila Sosa Villada won the French literary prize Grand Prix de l’Héroïne; The Chilean narrator Diamela Eltit was the winner of the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages ​​and a year before, the Carlos Fuentes International Prize for Literary Creation.

The Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane season y false hare, He naturally ventured into an area traditionally considered masculine, that of violence. The finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2020 explained to this newspaper that her attention is on tear off the layers to peel off as much of the onion of violence as possiblethrough asking what causes it, why it reproduces and why it is so difficult for us to change.

That approach was born, Melchor explained in 2023, from that, Being a woman in a place like Veracruz and Mexico, I experienced subjugation, violence of all kinds, harassment; things that made me think about what kind of value a woman’s life has in this society, what guarantees and rights.

The Mexican Valeria Luiselli won the 2021 Dublin Literary Prize for her novel Lost Children Archive and the novelist and translator Fernanda Trías (Uruguay 1976) received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize

Luiselli, finalist in 2019 for the Booker Prize, told this newspaper that There are books written in plagues, in wars. It seems fundamental to me that the union continues, no matter what happens, dedicated to continuing our work in whatever circumstances and reinventing the ways.

For her part, the narrator Cristina Liceaga, editor of the Anthology of Mexican Women Writers, He predicted that after the covid-19 pandemic, new ways of writing, of seeing literature and the world would emerge.

The Indian author and journalist Arundhati Roy highlighted a dilemma of the time: “pandemics have forced human beings to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a door between one world and the next (…) we can cross it walking lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”