Biography
Marica Campo was born and raised in O Incio. She later moved to the provincial capital, Lugo, where she attended a religious school with the intention of becoming a missionary. Having studied theology at the Pontifical University of Salamanca, she trained as a schoolteacher and taught for almost forty years in schools in Lugo province and the Canary Islands. She has written poetry, fiction, theatre and children’s literature and translated French authors into Galician. Her poetry has been awarded prizes by the Galician-Language Writers Association, which paid tribute to her work by erecting a monolith in her home town. Her best known works of fiction are the book of short stories Confusion and Death of María Balteira and the short novel Memoir for Xoana.
Synopsis
Memoir for Xoana (72 pages) is Marica Campo’s first novel. It was published in 2002 by the Coruña-based publishing house Espiral Maior, which is well known for publishing poetry, after it won the Vilalba Municipality Fiction Prize the previous year.
Sample
They say, Xoana, Xoana, you who haven’t arrived yet, your slippery body still sailing the amniotic waters of my belly, that my great-great-grandmother Pepa, Pepa the Mole, got pregnant in Monterroso, during the fair in November. She never knew who’d sown the seed between her legs that would grow to be Rosa, Pérez her last name too, and with no other surname, the way it usually is with children who have nobody to call their father.
They never found out who that man was, the one who took advantage of the darkness – the one that was part of the night and the other that was in the young girl’s eyes – and attacked her so brutally, so silently. Still, when she was old, the Mole prayed every day for his soul and blessed him for having given her that daughter, who was the light of day for her eyes, extinguished by the pox in the distant days of childhood.
Portico of Galician Literature 