CARMEN POSADAS

The Beauty of Literature


Carmen Posadas was born in Montevideo in 1953 and lives in Madrid since 1965, although she spent long periods of time in Moscow, Buenos Aires and London. Her father took on diplomatic roles in the latter city.

The collection of short-stories titled, Nothing is as it seems (1997) confirmed amongst readers and critics the success already achieved the previous year by the publishing of her first novel, Five Blue Flies (1996).

She has also written nearly 20 children's books - among them El señor viento Norte, that obtained the Prize of the Ministry of Culture to the best children's book edited in 1984 - a few essays and several scripts for cinema and television.

In the year 1998 she won the Planeta prize with the novel Small Infamies, which has been translated to 16 languages in more than 40 countries, with great public and sales success in many of them. The New York Times said of this novel that it was, "a delicacy that melts in the mouth held on an acidic and surprising plot of mystery". The Washington Post, on its part, said it was "a novel that has everything, an elegant décor, a perfect spatial-temporal construction, intriguing characters and marvellously developed writing". In the year 2002, the magazine Newsweek highlighted Carmen Posadas as one of the most prominent Latin-American authors of her generation.

In 2001 she published La Bella Otero, which will be made into a film soon.

In 2003 The Good Servant came out, which has been received as favourably by critics and audiences as her previous works and is already being translated to several languages.

In the year 2004 she obtained the Apel- Les Mestres prize for children's literature, with the book, "Cuac", and published "A la sombra de Lilith".