Elena Quiroga

1950 Nadal Prize

Viento del Norte is a surprising novel, especially considering the time it was written and the richness of its lexicon and colloquial expressions. A manor house novel, a rural novel—labels used by scholars that fall short and perhaps have contributed to the author's relegation to a category of regionalist or genre fiction. Yet, when we engage with the text, we discover in it a wealth of imagery and language, a freedom of writing, and a blending of styles that fascinated us so much in Latin American literature and in that father of great Galician writers, that anarchist of language, Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán.

A writing style where Spanish intertwines with idioms, turns of phrase, and entire sentences of a popular Galician language, full of charm and wit, yet repressed and silenced at the time. But from this fusion, this boldness, this freedom, emerges a symphony of images and rhythms, a rupture from the rigid Spanish of many writers of the era, and a literary legacy that may be lost—a true shame—when both languages become fully autonomous and each draws exclusively from its own past."—Lourdes Ortíz, in the novel’s prologue.