Spanish Granta authors at Litquake Festival in San Francisco

Spanish writers and Granta authors David Aliaga, Alejandro Morellón, and Irene Reyes Noguerol join Valerie Miles for a conversation about the literary world at the Litquake Festival organized by the Center for the Art of Translation.

In 2010, Granta introduced a new generation of Spanish-language writers destined to challenge the literary status quo. More than a decade later, they’ve assembled another era-defining list which reflects an even greater variety –geographically, linguistically, thematically. Join us for a conversation featuring David Aliaga, Alejandro Morellón, and Irene Reyes-Noguerol. Moderated by Valerie Miles, editor of Granta en Español.

About the authors

Valerie Miles is an American writer, editor, and translator who co-founded Spanish Granta in Barcelona, in 2003. She guest edited British Granta’s special issue 155: Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists, 2. She has overseen the Spanish language imprints Emecé and Alfaguara, where she worked with writers like Susan Sontag, Gunter Grass, John Banville, Mario Vargas Llosa, or Javier Marías, and her work of several years arranging Roberto Bolaño’s archive led to the first exhibition of his private papers, Archivo Bolaño, 1977 – 2003, which she curated with Barcelona’s Center for Contemporary Culture. During that time, she edited a few of his posthumous manuscripts. Her first book is A Thousand Forests in One Acorn, and among her recent translations are Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols for NYRB, and Milena Busquets’ novel, This Too Shall Pass, which won a PEN Translates Award and was a finalist for the Dublin Literature Prize. She worked with Azar Nafisi on her book about Nabokov for Yale University Press, and was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship for her work on Rafael Chirbes’ Cremation, recently published by New Directions. She is currently translating Bioy Casares’ monumental memoir on his intellectual life with Borges for NYRB. She has contributed to Granta, El País, The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Paris Review, among many others, and teaches in the postgraduate programs of Literary Translation and Creative Writing at Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

David Aliaga (1989) is a writer recognized by Granta as one of the best young Spanish-language novelists of the last decade. His fiction books include Y no me llamaré más Jacob (2016) and El año nuevo de los árboles (2018), some of whose short stories have been translated into English or German. Aliaga is a specialist in representation of Jewish identity, both in contemporary literature and in comic books, and in 2018 he co-directed Séfer, the Jewish Book Festival of Barcelona. Last year, the city of Barcelona awarded him with the Montserrat Roig scholarship for creative writing.

Alejandro Morellón (1985) is the author of the short story books La noche en que caemos (Monteleón Prize, 2012), El estado natural de las cosas (Gabriel García Márquez Prize, 2017), El peor escenario posible (Ignacio Aldecoa Prize, 2022), the novel Caballo sea la noche (Candaya, 2019) and the book of mistic poems Un dios extranjero (San Juan de la Cruz Mistic Poetry Prize). In 2021 was included by Granta magazine in their Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists list. Currently he lives in Madrid.

Irene Reyes-Noguerol (1997) has a BA in Hispanic Philology at the University of Seville and has completed a Creative Writing Workshop at the Camilo José Cela University of Madrid. She is currently working as a Spanish Language and Literature teacher. Reyes-Noguerol has won several awards, both in national and international story contests, and her texts have appeared, so far, in 14 anthologies. At the age of 18 she published her first solo book, Caleidoscopios, followed by De Homero y otros dioses (2018).