The winner of the 3rd Xosé Neira Vilas Award of Short Story is presented

This Sunday 30th of June at 19.00h the presentation of the awarded book of the third edition of the Xosé Neira Vilas Prize of Short Story for children and teenagers will take place in the headquarters of Neira Vilas’ Foundation in Gres (Vila de Cruces, Pontevedra). The act will have the participation of the author, Pedro Rielo; the member of the Audiovisual Studies Research Group and president of the Foundation, Fernando Redondo; together with the general secretary of Linguistic Politics, Valentín García; the literary critic and member of the jury, Armando Requeixo; and the representative of Edicións Embora, Miguel Toval, the editorial in charge of the edition of the winner work.

Detrás dos perdidos, the awarded text, seeks to catch the attention of the reader from the voice and gaze of a teenager that faces the summer holiday with the frustration of renouncing the days of beach, surf, disco and friends, in exchange of the village and his grandparents house. But everything changes when he finds adventure and mystery where he only expected boredom, in a work that registers the influence from audiovisual.

Located in the 80’s of last century, the novel adopts in a important part of its development the form of a road movie, being, at the same time, the cinema a fundamental source of inspiration for the story. For starting, the John Ford of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and the lesson of this movie: it is better to tell (and print) the legend than the reality of what happened, based on the fascination that every tale causes. On the other side, other young referents of those years are in the head and guide the steps of the protagonist, as the TV hero Magnun or the admired basket player Drazen Petrovic.

The presentation will also have the screening of a video piece elaborated for the occasion by the Audiovisual Studies Research Group. “Convídote a ler (e a escribir)” commemorates the trajectory of the prizes through the reflection on the act of reading and the creative process, rescuing the voice of Neira Vilas himself and with archival images provided by the Foundation.