Lara Dopazo Ruibal

Biography

Lara Dopazo Ruibal studied journalism at the University of Santiago de Compostela and holds two masters, one in International Cooperation and another in Theoretical and Practical Philosophy. Her first work, From Fish Island, formed the basis of a short film, Stone Island, directed by Adriana Páramo. Other publications include Sheep (2016), winner of the Francisco Añón Poetry Prize, Clementine (2016), Wolves in the House of Esau (2017), and Claus and the Scorpion (2018), a collection that explores healing and violence and winner of the Fiz Vergara Vilariño Poetry Prize. An English translation by Laura Cesarco Eglin is available from co·im·press and was longlisted for the 2023 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation. She has since published two fiction books: The Axolotl and Other Stories of Beasts and Water (2020), winner of the Illa Nova Award for authors under the age of 35, and Yankee Tales (2024), based on her experience of living in Iowa between 2021 and 2023, which received the Galician Critics’ Award.

Synopsis

Yankee Tales (118 pages) is a collection of thirteen short stories based on the author’s experience of living in Iowa between 2021 and 2023 while attending the University of Iowa’s MFA programme in creative writing. According to the blurb of the Galician edition published by Galaxia, the book contains tornadoes, cornfields, savage animals, reptilians, unexpected deaths, and a lot of cold. Reality and the supernatural merge until becoming indistinguishable. In the first story, “The Red Block House”, two women, Mia and the narrator, arrive from the same country and rent a house together. Mia occupies the ground floor (number 12), and the narrator lives upstairs (number 12½). Because they look alike, people joke that they are the same person.