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Clara Usón awarded the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 2018 Literature Prize

The writer Clara Usón  won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for her novel The Shy Assasin. The award is given within the framework of the International Book Fair of Guadalajara and its purpose is the dissemination of literature written by women (unlike many mixed awards, which are intended to contribute literature written by men).

The jury, composed of Ana García Bergua, Claudia Piñeiro and Daniel Centeno, decided to grant her the award unanimously, and stressed that in The Shy Assassin "the author records part of the Spanish transition in her proposal, between erudition and accessibility, bends the limits of the conventional novel daring to go further ".

The Shy Assassin is a novel based on the life of the author, full of humour, philosophy and devastating revelations.

Starting from the hectic and short life of the film actress Sandra Mozarowski, who died at age 18 when jumping from the balcony of her house –although the popular rumour assured that she was the king's lover and that the Spanish intelligence services were involved in her death–, Clara Usón finds tragicomic resonances of her own process of self-destruction and of the complex relationship she maintained as a child with her mother.

The Shy Assassin is also the real story of two women, of two generations who come into conflict when the reality of the country changes with the advent of democracy that closes the curtain of the dark decades of Franco's rule: the mother, cloistered in spite of herself in the family and domestic role assigned to women in the years of the dictatorship, takes refuge in alcohol and the daughter, as Sandra Mozarowski, is delivered to the years of liberation and debauchery, convinced that the future belonged to her, regardless of what was being taken from them.

Clara Usón (Barcelona, 1961) left the law, her profession for twenty years, to dedicate herself entirely to writing. She won the prestigious Biblioteca Breve Prize with Corazón de Napalm, a portrait of the aftermath of the excesses of the generation of the 80s, and the National Critica Award (an award that for 40 consecutive years had fallen only on men) with her novel The Daughter of the East, sold to 7 languages.