Biography
Blanca Riestra studied Hispanic Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela and completed a doctoral thesis on the nineteenth-century Spanish politician Juan Larrea at the University of Burgundy in France. She later spent periods in Rome and Albuquerque, being director of the Cervantes Institute in the latter city. From 1996, she started publishing works of fiction in Spanish. She has since published three novels in Galician – Noire Compostela (2016), recipient of the La Voz de Galicia Award for novels in instalments; Here Begins the Sea (2022), which won the prestigious Blanco Amor Award, one of three major fiction awards in Galicia; and Triton (2024). She works as a secondary schoolteacher in Oleiros, Coruña.
Synopsis
Here Begins the Sea (246 pages) won the Blanco Amor Award for long novels in 2021. It is Blanca Riestra’s second novel in the Galician language and is divided into five parts. In Part I, the narrator, a woman, describes the bars where people used to hang out in Coruña, “the second capital of Francoism”, in the last decades of the twentieth century, through the eyes of characters such as Vari the photographer, Nikopol the poet, Cabanas the painter and Pedro, with his interest in numbers.
Sample
At that precise moment, in that place in a corner, unknown forces coincided. Adolescent X is sitting at the beginning of it all. Of course she doesn’t know it’s the beginning of anything, she’s actually convinced she’s been caught up in it for some time. And she’s tired of it.
“Tired,” she says, letting the words come out of her mouth like marbles. She spits out marbles that fall in front of her, at her feet. Yesterday, in one of the vintage shops near San Andrés fountain, she’d bought a dress with acrylic flowers that she thinks is so punk. She has it on her bed, spread out, next to some low, pointy-toed boots, and studies it with something akin to desire.
But today a kind of sadness makes her understand it’s not worth bothering about anything.
What is it she’s trying to do? Well, she’s trying to enjoy herself. Later on, she’ll be forced to look for other things, ones she hasn’t thought of yet, unavoidable, even dreadful things: earning money, paying the rent, being happy. Not now, now she doesn’t want to do anything but have a good time.
Portico of Galician Literature 