EDEBÉ Young Adult Literature Award 2024:
Reyes de la montañaby Daniel Hernandez Chambers
After a few days of camping, disconnected from the world in the mountains, a group of young people and their monitor from the youth center return to the refuge only to discover that a deadly virus has completely changed their world. When the monitor disappears after going to seek help, the kids are forced to apply the skills they've learned and strengthen the bonds created during their time together. As the months pass, tension will escalate to unsustainable levels, challenging the resilience and unity of the new order they have established.
The narrative of a globally-reaching tragedy that, from a particular perspective, exposes the gray areas of human character and its idiosyncrasies: Will Rousseau's optimistic proposal prevail, or Hobbes's view of Homo homini lupus? Both approaches will unfold throughout a plot whose characters mirror of the lights and shadows of youth in the last decades of the 20th century: great adaptability, resilience, and quickness to reinvent themselves, but also victims of profound loneliness due to lacking genuine affectionate bonds. Alone and unprotected, the protagonists will have to demonstrate if they are capable of building and maintaining their own network of relationships as the only possibility of salvation.
Work presented in Spanish aimed at readers from thirteen years of age.
Published: March 20, 2024
Fragment:
«The idea was not for them to serve a 10-month prison sentence, but rather that when they regained their freedom they would be able to develop bonds of affection that would later serve as lifelines. Because every life is in danger of shipwreck at some point."
RAMÓN
DANIEL HERNÁNDEZ CHAMBERS
He was born in 1972 in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, into a Spanish-British family. Throughout his life he has undertaken a wide variety of jobs, such as a waiter at an ice cream parlor (where he depleted the stock of lemon slush), Braille transcriber, hotel bellboy in London, flight supervisor, translator, station chief and train driver on the Alicante railway. However, above all else, he considers himself a writer.
He has published more than fifty works of fiction. In 2012 she won the Leer es Vivir Award for the novel A Fragment of Night in a Jar, which was followed by Ala Delta, in 2016, for El secreto de Enola; the Alandar, in 2017, by Miralejos; the Vila d'Ibi, in 2018, for The girl who collected stamps and the boy who waited for a train; the Algar, in 2019, for A hat is loose; and with one of her most recent works, Department of Magical Affairs, she has received two very special awards, the Azagal award in 2022 and the Hache award in 2023, the latter with a jury made up of more than two thousand teenagers.
With Edebé He has also published the Chelo Holmes series, and the novels Águilas sobre Damascus, Scary Stories in the Lighthouse, Elvira's Album of Words and The Map of the Impossible, which were finalists in consecutive editions of the award. Edebé.
