Cristina Rivera Garza Wins the Xavier Villaurrutia Award: Femicide in Literature

The Mexican author, translator and literary critic Cristina Rivera Garza, in recognition of her work "The Invincible Summer of Liliana" (2021), was declared the winner of the 2021 Xavier Villaurrutia Award. The National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature of Mexico, in a press release, said: "The author narrates with sobriety and various literary and testimonial resources, the heartbreaking family experience of an unresolved femicide."

The award jury, made up of María de los Ángeles Comesaña y Cocheiro, María Julia Hidalgo López and Armando González Torres, explained that "the novel reconstructs the atmosphere of the end of the last century and warns of the signs of ominous violence against women, which still suffering."

Femicide In Literature: an Archive that Tells a Story

Cristina Rivera Garza, who will receive the recognition on July 5, declared that this was an award for Liliana Rivera Garza, her younger sister, whom she lost 30 years ago due to femicide . She also stated that she believed that she would have liked to share it with the women who have been cruelly disappeared.

As for the book, she indicated that she was able to write "The Invincible Summer of Liliana" thanks to the file that his sister built during his life, in addition to her letters, notes, diaries, and annotations, which remained intact all these years. And she affirmed that all this was the sustenance of that book, and that it is both her and her sister Liliana's. She also said that their intermingled voices are found in it, as well as the experiences to achieve, in the end, what could be understood as shared authorship. When the book was published in 2021, the author stated that all her previous books had prepared her to write this one about her sister's femicide, which is undoubtedly a difficult experience to endure.

Read also:Femicides: Latin America on Red Alert

Who Is Cristina Rivera Garza?

She is a professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. Her work, which since "Unknown", her first novel, highlighted her as a promising author, has been recognized by critics, academia and readers from all over the continent and the world. And it was with her novel "No One Will See Me Cry", José Rubén Romero National Novel Award, 1997, IMPAC-Conarte-ITESM International Award, 1999 and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award, in 2001, that her literary career positioned her in the place of the most outstanding letters of our language. Among others, she has received the José Donoso Ibero-American Prize for Literature, one of the most important on the American continent.

Undoubtedly, Cristina Rivera Garza is one of the most important pens of our language, and about which everything that should be said or recognized is still not said or recognized. Her work, which is as long as it is wide, should not be discarded so that, in the coming years, it will receive greater recognition. Why not, a Nobel Prize for Literature or the Miguel de Cervantes Prize.

The Xavier Villaurrutia Award

The Xavier Villaurrutia Award is a literary recognition that is given each year to the best book published in Mexico . The first prize, which was awarded retroactively, went to the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo for his work Pedro Páramo, one of the most outstanding in universal literature. Throughout its history, it has been awarded to well-known literary figures, such as Octavio Paz, Fernando del Paso, Homero Aridjis, Amparo Dávila, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Juan José Arreola, María Luisa Puga, Jaime Sabines, Sergio Pitol and Inés Arredondo among many others.