Biography
Ignacio Vidal Portabales is Associate Professor of Mercantile Law at the University of Santiago de Compostela. His first novel, Diogenes in Dolorida (2013), a light-hearted look at romantic relationships, received the prestigious Blanco Amor Award for long novels. He then published The Inspector and Me (2016), about a boudoir photographer in a peaceful town who receives a visit from an inspector, and Lara and Sabela (2020), about the owner of an art gallery who models for one of her clients. His novel Remote Islands (2022), a reference to the islands of Galicia and Columbia, won another major Galician literary award, the García Barros. His YA title Blood in the Drone (2022) tells of an orphan boy who designs drones in the City of Bells and who must confront the triads in order to save the girl he loves.
Synopsis
Remote Islands (216 pages) is Ignacio Vidal Portabales’s fourth novel in the Galician language and won the García Barros Award in 2022. It is divided into two parts and seven chapters. In the first chapter, Cata and Luci are sisters. They are in a tiny apartment with only two rooms, narrow like a toy train. They are waiting for their father to arrive.
Sample
The apartment was tiny. Barely a room and a bedroom, narrow as the carriage of a toy train. The former acted as a kitchen and dining room; the latter, despite its scant dimensions, was divided by a kind of folding screen made out of two thin sticks miraculously supporting a blue and white bedspread. The idea on the part of whoever carried out this improvement was to safeguard the inhabitants’ intimacy, but such an aspiration was seen to be almost impossible given the physical reality of the space in question. That said, it held a bed and a cot, which was positioned a little obliquely. There were shelves on the upper section of the wall, crammed with the most diverse objects, as if the variety of contents were enough to give it the category of home: a rusty fan, balancing precariously; puzzle magazines, the letters on the covers almost faded because of the sun; a few unopened cans of food, either side of an old doll; several glass jars full of remnants and buttons, similar to those you might find in a haberdasher’s; a solitary bag of rice, which gave every impression of being out of date; a guide to breeding goldfinches; a child’s book for doing sums; two suspicious-looking nappies; a small toolbox sitting on a worn cushion; a table lamp, coupled with a broken lectern; and even a device for pumping up bicycle tyres. There, in that disorder, lived two girls.
Portico of Galician Literature 