Ana Alcolea. «The words and the characters surprise me as I write»

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Ana Alcolea is a writer from Zaragoza with a long career both in teaching Language and literature as in the publication of informative works, literature child and youth (won the Cervantes Chico Award in 2016) and finally, novels as Under the lion of Saint Mark o Margarita's toast, which presents now. Thank you very much for your time, kindness and dedication for this interview.

Ana Alcolea. Interview

  • ACTUALIDAD LITERATURA: Do you remember the first book you read? And the first story you wrote?

ANA ALCOLEA: Probably the first book I read was The Three Musketeers, by Alexander Dumas, in an illustrated edition for children. At least it's the first I remember. The first book I wrote was The lost locket, a novel set in Africa, in which a boy looks for the medallion his father wore when he died in a plane crash in the jungle.

  • AL: What was the first book that struck you and why?

AA: Two very different books, Jane Eyre, by Charlote Brönte, for his unconventional love story, and for his landscapes so different from those in which I lived. Y Ask Alicia, which was published as the real diary of a teenage girl living in the world of drugs. I was very impressed.

  • AL: Who is your favorite writer? You can choose more than one and from all eras.

AA: This is a very difficult question to answer. There are many and very fascinating: from Homer, Sophocles, Cervantes y Shakespeare a Tolstoy, herink Ibsen, Sigrid UnsetDostoievski, and Thomas Man, Stephan Zweig. From the present time I stay with Juan Marsé, Manuel Vilas, Mauricio Wiesenthal and Irene Vallejo.

  • AL: What character in a book would you have liked to meet and create?

AA: A Don Quijote de la Mancha, which we actually create every day, and if not, we go wrong. It is a character that seeks to make of his life a work of art, something beautiful for him and for others. He wants to be a gentleman in a novel and every day he invents one or more adventurous episodes so that his ideal may survive. Live between fiction and reality, as we all do. Cervantes knew how to see and reflect it better than anyone.

  • AL: Any mania when it comes to writing or reading?

AA: Before I used to listen to opera to write. But now I write generally silent, especially in this period, in which I live in a very quiet place. I focus very easily anywhere. I like to start writing my novels in a notebook, by hand. Then I continue with the computer, but I enjoy that moment of sliding the pen, black, over the paper and seeing how words are emerging that will become stories.

And read, I only read on paper. I do not have electronic support to read books. I like to leaf through and touch the paper. So I am aware that history is always in its place. On the screen it would seem that as the page turned, the words and what they mean would vanish.

  • AL: And your preferred place and time to do it?

AA: In the mornings after having breakfast and with the cup of tea still steaming. If I am at home, I write on the office, with a window to my left. Outside the home, I usually write in Trains and in the aircraft when I travel.

  • AL: What do we find in your latest novel, Margarita's toast?

AA: Margarita's toast is a trip to the present and the past of the protagonist, who returns to her family home to empty it after the death of her father. The objects, the papers, the books take her to the time when she was part of that home, during the Transition years. It is not a novel complacent with the time, or with family relationships, not even with the protagonist, who is also the narrator. No heroes in Margarita's toast. Only people. Neither more nor less than just people.

  • AL: Other genres that you like besides the historical novel?

AA: I usually read novel more intimate than historical. I am interested in the characters and their dialogue with their time, which is part of their life circumstances. I also read poetry, because I almost always find myself in it.

  • AL: What are you reading now? And writing?

AA: I am reading a biography of Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. I am writing a book that could be titled My life in a cabin because I have been living for seven months fifty percent of the time in an isolated cabin in the mountains, in Norway, and I want to express my relationship with nature: the voices of the river, the whispering of the leaves of the trees, the change of the seasons ... I think we need to live more in contact and conversation with nature, and writing this book is teaching me to look and listen more and better.

  • AL: How do you think the publishing scene is for as many authors as there are or want to publish?

AA: This is also a difficult question to answer. I feel very privileged because so far I have published practically everything I have written. I see that there are many authors who want to publish immediately, in a hurry, and this is a profession for which you have to be very patient. You have to write a lot. And above all you have to read a lot.

I started writing when I was over thirty-five years old, and the first publisher I sent an original to didn't want it. The second yes, and with it it has more than 30 editions. I have a novel that went through two publishers that did not publish it, a third published it, and I am delighted with it. You have to know how to wait. If the book is good, it almost always ends up finding its place. Usually.

  • AL: Is the moment of crisis that we are experiencing being difficult for you or will you be able to keep something positive for future novels?

AA: The time is emotionally difficult for everyone, of course. I have been very creative in this period and I have written many things, in which the topic of the pandemic has been introduced without my having had a prior will. When I start a novel I don't know what is going to happen, the novel is being created and sometimes issues that you did not have at the beginning slip through.

I believe that novels are like life: we know that it will end, but we do not know how or when. The words and characters surprise me as I write. I think that is very important in my novels. Margarita has surprised me a lot while writing her story in Margarita's toast. I have learned a lot about her and about myself.


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