EDEBÉ Children's Literature Award 2015: El signo prohibido, by Rodrigo Muñoz Avia
«More than 70% of the words that appear in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy have the letter A. So if, by chance, you want to speak without saying A, you will discover that it is not easy. I assure. Speaking, making yourself understood, and answering exams without using it even once is one of the most difficult things a human being can do. For a week, I did it.
Jorge is a reserved and intelligent child who likes to reflect on the exact meaning of words and phrases. Normal: he has grown up in the light of the admiration of his father, a bookseller by profession, for the work of Georges Perec and his innovative, particular and brilliant relationship with language.
It all starts the day Aleksandra, her best friend, disappears. Jorge is eleven years old and cannot take justice into his own hands, but he has a way out. If Perec was able to create a palindrome with 1.247 words, Jorge will turn his life into a lipogram until Aleksandra appears, giving up pronouncing the letter A, that of her friend. With this solemn gesture of mourning, protest and tribute, the boy refuses surrender or indifference.
However, as he persists in his decision, he feels stronger. Little by little, Jorge will courageously take on the adventure of investigating and recovering what he loves most in the world.
Far from being a display of rhetorical acrobatics, El signo prohibido It is not only an innovative children's novel that reflects on absence, nor a moving story of love, friendship and mystery, nor a bridge to a great writer of the 20th century, it is also an interesting exercise that puts language in the foreground as versatile. (and powerful!) tool, at the pace of a detective novel. Mirror of what happens to us, it is also a world in itself, a world to build, to know and to inhabit as one's own refuge.
Publication: March 2015
Rodrigo Munoz Avia
A career philosopher, his priority activity is literary, he writes for adults as well as for children and young people, which he alternates with being a film scriptwriter and with the dissemination and interpretation of the work of his parents, the painters Lucio Muñoz and Amalia Avia .
In the field of literature for adults, his most successful novel stands out, Psychiatrists, psychologists and other sick people (2005), with multiple editions and translations. In 2007 she published terrestrial lives, and in the spring of 2015, without losing humor as the main hallmark, his new novel will be released, Cactus.
In the field of children's literature, novels stand out The perfect ones and My brother the genius, with which he already won the award Edebé in 2007 and 2010. He has published youth novels, such as What we don't know (Jaén award, 1996) or the last one, The gorilla cage, 2011, on the topic of political corruption.
He has recently won the SGAE 2014 Children's Theater Award, with the work A monster in my country, a kind of moral fable on the topic of inequality, racism and social exclusion.