The full interview with Berta Dávila, Premio Young Ostana 2025, conducted byAndrea Fantino.
The 2025 Young Prize reveals an author who’s mature and refined, with a political outlook free from hypocrisy.
Well-established and mature in her artistic choices and convictions, Berta Dávila has a clear path laid out before her, one that seems almost inevitable: for her, writing is like breathing, “it’s a joyful activity”; not a “tormented process linked to the rhetoric of the solitary, isolated genius who suffers before the blank page”. Berta moves away from an elitist conception of literature, and thus comes to want to include everyone in a possible process of writing, of creation. “For me, writing a novel is one of the best things you can do in life. Like singing in the car, going to the seaside with friends or travelling. Writing a novel is an experience I recommend.”
When Mariona Miret, who conducted the interview, asks her about Galician’s ‘state of health’, the writer admits she lacks the expertise of a sociolinguist to give the best possible answer, but she reveals a strong political stance, shining a spotlight on the political and social conditions that influence the vitality of her mother tongue: “Galician, when compared with other minority languages around the world, isn’t in the misma situation: it’s an official language, it’s taught in schools, and it’s still widely spoken. Of course, there’re cross-cutting conflicts that affect its vitality: issues of class, capitalism and globalisation, the political orientation of governments and their conception of a people’s language. Even gender issues can influence the contexts in which a language is spoken.”
“Accepting a particular account of the linguistic conflict – in countries where two languages coexist and where there’s diglossia – doesn’t mean claiming that this coexistence is peaceful or balanced. In reality, there are very few places in the world where two languages coexist in harmony without tension. In Galicia, there’re many Spanish speakers who regard Spanish as their language. But this does not mean that it is Galicia’s own language: Galicia’s own language is Galician. And the process by which Castilian arrived here and began to rapidly replace it is not a natural or meteorological phenomenon, but a conflict with historical and political roots, one that is very painful for many people […] No people have a natural predisposition to abandon their own language. When a Galician speaker begins to speak Castilian as well because they think it’s the language of progress and the future, it’s a painful and complex process.”
Let’s start by being honest and demanding honest politics, just as Berta Dávila suggests. Go and read her books; her writing can be profound and delicate, poetic and evocative, yet always precise, to the point, and at times perhaps even surgical. In Italian, you’ll find the novel “Emma Olsen’s Last Book”, published by Aguaplano. The publisher describes it as “a short, vital and poignant novel. A meta-literary interplay of projections, symmetries and vanishing points set against the backdrop of the endless American plains, the dust, and the scars that each of us carries within us”.
A book written in Galician and set in the United States, with an American protagonist.
Because a language can and must thrive even beyond its own borders.
Watch the full interview here: