Karina Sainz Borgo and James Womack win the seventh edition of the Granada International Writers-in-Residence Programme (2024)
After the editions of 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023, the International Program of Writers in Residence of Granada, organized by the Granada City of Literature Unesco program (Culture Area of the Granada City Council) jointly with the University of Granada , have launched their seventh global call in 2024 through the network of Unesco Cities of Literature, once again gathering a large number of applications with a very high general literary quality.
A total of 167 applications from 49 countries have been submitted.
The distribution of applications received by country: Algeria (1). Argentina (4). Armenia (2). Australia (3). Azerbaijan (1). Belgium (1). Brazil (3). Bulgaria (1). Canada (3). China (2). Colombia (4). Cuba (5). Egypt (1). France (2). Germany (7). Great Britain (31). Haiti (1). Iceland (2). India (1). Indonesia (1). Iran (8). Iraq (1). Ireland (2). Italy (1). Kazakhstan (1). Lithuania (2). Malta (2). Mauritius (1). Mexico (7). Mongolia (1). Montenegro (2). Nicaragua (1). Netherlands (2). New Zealand (2). Poland (6). Romania (2). Russia (3). Serbia (2). South Africa (1). South Korea (1). Spain (13). Sweden (1). Türkiye (1). Uganda (1). Ukraine (16). Uganda (1). United Arab Emirates (1). United States (9). Uzbekistan (1). Venezuela (1).
The jury
On 23 July 2023, the jury, meeting at the Federico García Lorca Centre in Granada, and composed of Miguel Carrera, representing the University of Granada, Jesús Ortega, representing the Granada City of Literature Unesco programme (Department of Culture of Granada City Council) and the writer and UGR lecturer Gerardo Rodríguez Salas, chose Karina Sainz Borgo (Venezuela) and James Womack (United Kingdom) as new Residents in the 2024 edition of the Granada International Writers-in-Residence Programme.
The jury valued Karina Sainz Borgo’s interest and the projection of a narrative work in constant growth, which has seduced numerous readers from all over the world, has been translated into twenty languages and has already won important prizes with three published novels. His work proposal for Granada consists of the completion of his fourth novel, Nazarena, a literary project that closes the cycle formed by La hija de la española and El tercer país, halfway between a family saga and a psychological exploration, with madness at the centre of personal and social reflection. Of James Womack, the jury highlighted the richness and complexity of his position as a creator (as well as a publisher and university professor), a cosmopolitan position, open to the world, which includes four solid books of poems and an extensive career as a literary translator from Russian and Spanish. The proposed work he has presented consists of a series of poems about Granada, a city charged with the past and which the author conceives as a palimpsest, a multiple space where history seeps in a particular way into the surface of everyday life ‘to show how the exalted and degraded ideas of Granada exist in every atom of the city and in every moment of its life’.
Karina Sainz Borgo
Karina Sainz Borgo (Caracas, 1982) was born in Venezuela ‘when everything was about to go up in flames’. She works as a journalist specialising in cultural issues, although she writes all the time. She has published the journalism books Caracas hip-hop (Caracas, 2007) and Tráfico y Guaire. El país y sus intelectuales (Caracas, 2007), and maintains the blog Crónicas Barbitúricas, from which she extracted the texts published in Crónicas barbitúricas. El asombro y la ira (Círculo de Tiza, 2019). Her first novel, La hija de la española (Lumen, 2019), acclaimed by critics and readers and sold in translation in thirty countries, won the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro, was a finalist for the LiBeraturpreis and was nominated for the IMPAC International Dublin Literary Award. She is also the author of the novels The Island of Doctor Schubert (Lumen, 2023), finalist for the Grand Continent Prize, and The Third Country (Lumen, 2021), which won the Jan Michalski Prize in 2023.
James Womack
James Womack (1979) is a Cambridge-based poet, editor and translator. He studied Russian, English and translation at Oxford University, and received his doctorate on W.H. Auden’s translations. He lived in Madrid from 2008 to 2017, and now teaches Spanish, translation and study skills at Cambridge University. He is a freelance translator from Russian and Spanish concentrating mostly on poetry. He is the author of four collections of poetry, all published by the Manchester-based Carcanet Press: Misprint (2012), On Trust: A Book of Lies (2017, shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Prize; longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize), Homunculus (2020), and Why Are You Shouting (2024). His most recent translations are Heaven, by Manuel Vilas, a selection of poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky, both published by Carcanet, and a new translation of Camilo José Cela’s The Hive (New York Review Books, 2023; second edition 2024). He co-runs the independent Calque Press.
