Cristina Rivera Garza wins the Pulitzer with a book about her sister’s femicide

The Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza won this Monday the Pulitzer Prize in the ‘Memory or Autobiography’ category for ‘The Invincible Summer of Liliana’, a work in which she addresses the femicide of her younger sister that occurred in 1990.

“A genre story about the author’s 20-year-old sister, murdered by an old boyfriend, that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography, united with a determination born of loss”argued the organization of these awards, dependent on Columbia University (New York), when granting him the award.

The Mexican author competed with ‘The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness and the Tragedy of Good Intentions’, by Jonathan Rosen, and with ‘The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight’, by Andrew Leland, both Penguin Press titles.

Garza, also a historian and teacher, had previously won with this book – published in English by Penguin Random House and Hogarth Books – the Xavier Villaurrutia Writers’ Prize for Writers 2021 or the Rodolfo Walsh Prize at the Gijón Black Week 2022.

In addition to the section in which Garza won, who has dealt with controversial topics such as migration, politics and mental health during his career, the Pulitzer Board also revealed its winners in other artistic categories.

And, despite being popularly known for its awards for the most select journalism, it also lavishes itself on literature, poetry and music.

Other winners in artistic categories of the Pulitzer 2024

In this 108th edition of the Pulitzer Prizes, the winner in ‘Fiction’ was Jayne Anne Phillips with ‘Night Watch’; a novel defined by the Board as “of great beauty” for its portrait of an asylum in West Virginia after the Civil War, where a seriously wounded veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, mistreated by a Confederate soldier, fight to survive. heal

In the dramatic genre, New York author Eboni Booth triumphed with ‘Primary Trust’: “A simple and elegantly crafted story of an emotionally damaged man who finds a new job, new friends and a new sense of worth,” according to the organization.

‘No right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era’, by Jacqueline Jones, triumphed in the ‘History’ section with this “astonishingly original” reconstruction of the lives of African-Americans in Boston that “profoundly alters our understanding of the city’s abolitionist legacy.”

In the biography section, Jonathan Eig prevailed with ‘King: a Life’, a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. that draws on new sources to “enrich the understanding” of each stage of the civil rights leader’s life.

This award was shared with Ilyon Woo and his ‘Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom,’ a narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848.

In terms of poetry, Brandon Som, of Mexican and Chinese origin, triumphed with ‘Tripas’, where he highlighted the “dignity” of his family’s work life and their effort to create a community in a new country for them.

Well-known Anglo-Saxon media contributor Nathan Thrall won in ‘Nonfiction’ with ‘A day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy’, “a meticulous and intimate account of life under the Israeli occupation of the West Bank,” told via a Palestinian father whose five-year-old son dies in a school bus accident when Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams are delayed while trying to comply with safety regulations.

Finally, the 2024 Pulitzer music award went to Tyshawn Sorey for ‘Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith)’, premiered on March 16, 2023 at Atlanta Symphony Hall, an introspective saxophone concerto.

With information from EFE