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María Teresa Andruetto 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Award Author Winner

Hans Christian Andersen Acceptance Speech

I was brought up in a village in the provinces, in a country in a continent, which almost entirely shares one language. Despite its overwhelming vastness—we're talking about the voice of over 450 million people—the literature of this continent occupies a somewhat peripheral place in terms of translation into other languages. However, this Spanish of mine—which gave birth to styles such as the Baroque and Conceptismo—is not one single language but rather a great range of variants developed in Spain and Latin America. These different ways of speaking and writing are hybrids made up of the voice of the original inhabitants and the contribution of Africans, Europeans and Asians. Whether they were enslaved, conquered, accepted or welcomed, they all permeated our ways of speaking and thinking.

The most important phrase in my house was "this generous country took your father in." I am descended from immigrants or, in other words, from the poor and the exiled. For as long as I remember, and no doubt long before, I heard stories about people who arrived in Latin America many years ago: men and women whose humble episodes took on a new relevance as the tale unfolded. I was brought up by a mother who loved telling stories and a father who had left his family behind in Italy and who retold the tale of travelling to Argentina and meeting my mother an infinite number of times. I was brought up on the Argentinian plains in a land of melancholy pragmatists, in a family with a great thirst for knowledge and a house where there were always books, and people told very detailed stories about the lives of those who came before. Maybe that is why I am so passionate about finding the extraordinary in the lives of every one of us, about finding the extraordinary in life itself.

María Teresa Andruetto with her medal (Photo by Jack Dix Davies)

And so I grew up with a great familiarity with stories and books and the idea that we need to know a little about everything in order to live in the world. I remember the exact moment when I discovered—in a book very much of that era which I found in the family kitchen—that those little drawings called letters could come together and form words and that those words were the names of things. It wasn't a question of literature; it was life itself, which was presenting itself in that way for everyone to see, in every house and every family, or so I thought at the time. Many years later I realized that not all children had access to books and that is what caused me to take a certain direction in life: that of helping to construct readers.

Giving sense to experience: life's beauty lies in the awareness of this need. Living consciously is about defending our own singularity both as individuals and as a people. There is much demand for books to standardize their subject matter and use of language, so that they all become slightly neutral, but literature always seeks out the particular, the real pulsing of the language and its ever-slippery movement. Editors from other countries or languages have often told me that my writing is "too Argentinian." However, it is precisely there in the language of the society that contains us that a writer's greatest challenge lies: that is his or her battlefield. And yet, the more deeply we delve into the individual and the less standard our writing becomes, the more difficult it is to export it. This is particularly complicated in my case, as I have written from the perspective of different types of Argentinian Spanish from my country's various regions, not because I want to create a panorama of the many ways of speaking in my homeland but because my chosen narrator has demanded it. I always imagine a narrator and try to hear how he or she speaks...