Oscar Soto Colas. Interview

Oscar Soto Colas He is from La Rioja. He also chairs the ARE (Rioja Association of Writers). He is author of the blood of the earth y The devil in Florence, who won the Círculo de Lectores de Novela Award in 2017, and has just released his latest novel entitled venetian red. In this interview He tells us about her and several other topics. I really appreciate her time and kindness dedicated to her.

Oscar Soto Colas. Interview

• ACTUALIDAD LITERATURA: Your new novel is titled venetian red. What do you tell us about it and where did the idea come from?

OSCAR SOTO COLAS: tells the life of Joan of Castro, a woman of the XVII with gift for painting, and her struggle to become what she was born to be: an artist. To do this, she has to face the fate that others want to impose on her. A fictional story, but one that owes a lot to women artists who until recently did not appear in art history books. The idea arises precisely when I delve into that same history of art and verify how on many occasions the contribution of women to art has been ignored or despised.

• AL: Can you go back to that first book you read? And the first story you wrote?

CSO: If it was not the first, one of the first was a collection of stories of Chesterton on the Father Brown that my sister gave me. A wonderful book that I still have. I don't have my first story very present, but I'm sure it was one of the comics that when I was 7 or 8 years old I remember writing and drawing. More than superheroes, they mixed two themes that I was passionate about at the time: cowboys and indians movies and robots giants. Maybe that's where a whole new genre came from. 

• AL: A head writer? You can choose more than one and from all eras. 

OSC: Bufff… I could give you a list of 50 without blinking an eye. To name a few, although I will forget many others: Murakami, Franzen, Ursula K. Leguin, atxaga, my countryman Andres Pascual. Edward Mendoza, Miles, Landman, Marias, Ana Gavalda, Toti Mtez. of Lecea, Shan Sa, Arundhati Roy, Hillary Mantel, Richard Ford, Cormac McArthy and of course Stephen King.

Of the classics Scott Fitzgerald, Unamuno, baroja and of course Dickens y Tolstoy. Everything there is to know about the novel is in History of two cities y Guerra y paz. 

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

OSC: I'm not mythomaniac in that regard, so I don't want to get to know any character in a novel more than what its author has wanted to show me about him. Regarding creation, I would say that any of those who populate the Macondo of Garcia Marquez. It is impossible to merge character, place and plot in such a superb way. A perfect conjunction.

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

OSC: None in particular. A bit of instrumental music and preferably I like to write for the morning. Other than that nothing else. 

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

OSC: As I said earlier in the morning. Of 9 to 13 is my best timeAlthough I don't have a special mania either. If a scene or a chapter has me trapped and I can't stop writing, I can do it in the afternoon or at night.

• AL: Are there other genres that you like? 

OSC: I really like the science fiction and I read a lot test. The first thing because I believe that a society can be traced through its science fiction. It is a magnificent thermometer to press an era. In essay I read everything from art to sociology. I used to read a lot of poetry, but I've stopped doing it and I should go back to it. In these times reading for the pleasure of reading is almost something subversive. Poetry is almost something subversive. 

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

OSC: I am reading a bibliography of Caravaggio by Andrew Graham Dixon. I just started it. Only yesterday he would have told you that he read Virginia Feito. I am writing, or rather correcting, a columna for a media. 

• AL: How do you think the publishing scene is?

OSC: We live in curious times in that regard. So much has never been published. and that has its positive part and another not so much. I am left with the idea that never in the history of the human being have we had so much access to literature.

• AL: Is the moment of crisis that we are experiencing being difficult for you or will you be able to keep something positive in both the cultural and social spheres?

OSC: I believe that changes bring opportunities. It's a cliché, but I'm a strong advocate of it. Audiobooks, the transfer of literature to the audiovisual medium or new technologies are changing the way we approach fiction. I believe that, as they always have, honest and lovingly crafted stories will survive. Telling stories is in the DNA of the human being. It is part of the process that made us who we are today and that will not change. Just change the vehicle to tell those stories.