Agustín Fernández Paz: Author – Spain

If I had to define myself in few words, I would say I am a person who delights in making up stories and telling them in writing. A storyteller, although this should always take second place because what I really like is to read what others write. And reading and writing, as we know, are two sides of the same coin. Stories, books: the invisible thread which unites us to everybody on the planet.

A. F. Paz

a champion of Galician Literature, Agustín Fernández Paz has contributed more than forty-five titles to the field, mainly for children and young adults. His books, written in Galician, are regularly translated into the other Spanish languages (Castilian, Catalan, and Basque), and some have also been translated into Portugese, French, Korean, English, and Arabic. Paz’ works tend to be colored by fantastical-realism, intertextuality, and dichotomies. His stories are about memory and understanding and forgiving rather than forgetting; they are about mystery, history, and identity; they also tend to have female characters as heroines.

Paz was born in Vilalba, Galicia, in 1947. His early field of studies was Industrial Expertise; however, his passion for culture and literature found an outlet in teaching, and he developed a great interest in education. Paz’ conviction that the world could be changed through schools led him to take an active part in the educational reform movements in the post-Franco era. His teaching career spanned over thirty years, and it was his work as an educator and his exposure to children’s and young adults’ literature that eventually was the catalyst for him becoming a writer: After the introduction of the Galician language into teaching, the need arose for reading literature written in Galician; thus, Paz started writing stories and didactic material for his classes and eventually went on to becoming a published author. The positive reception of his early works encouraged him to continue his writing, and over the years, his focus shifted from theoretical and didactic material to writing more fiction.

Agustín Fernández Paz’s works have received numerous prizes, on both national and international levels. For instance, his classroom book, Canles 5, received the Emilia Pardo Bazán National Award for non-sexist textbooks. During the first Language and Literature Congress for children and adolescents, held in Santiago, Chile in 2010, a panel of experts deemed Agustín Fernández Paz’ collection of short stories Contos por palabras (Stories for Words, 1991) one of the eleven essential titles in children’s and young adults’ literature of the twentieth century. This collection also made the IBBY Honour List in 1992, as did Aire Negro in 2002 and O único que queda é o amor in 2010. Paz has also been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2013.

Now that he has retired from teaching, Paz continues to weave the threads of life into words; he believes his best work is yet to come.