Biography
Berta Dávila is the author of three poetry collections: Empty Body (2007), Inside (2008) and Root of the Fissure (2013), which won the Spanish Critics’ Prize for best poetry collection. She has also written three books of fiction: the novel I Will Dance on Your Tomb (2008), the book of short stories The Art of Failure (2010), translated into Spanish and Japanese, and the novel Emma Olsen’s Last Book (2013), her best-known work, translated into Spanish and awarded the Repsol Short Fiction Prize and the Galician Publishers’ Association prize for best work of fiction. As a result of this book, she was made the Galician Publishers’ Association author of the year.
Synopsis
Emma Olsen’s Last Book (124 pages) was published by one of the main Galician publishing houses, Editorial Galaxia, who then brought out a Spanish translation of the same book in their Mar Maior series for distribution in Spain and Latin America.
Sample
Nobody realized Emma Olsen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Dream Grass, was living out her last months with a terminal illness, her only intention to finish a book before she died. Reserved and cautious about her public appearances, Olsen – the eyes of the Midwest – passed away last Friday in her childhood home in Faith (South Dakota), having moved there from her apartment in New York, where she had lived for the last two decades, because she said she felt incapable of writing the book she was working on in any other part of the world.
Accompanied only by her daughter, Linda, whom she entrusted with the task of seeing that this book – the one we offer you now – should see the light, Olsen’s premature death, before the age of forty, cuts short a brilliant literary career and leaves a gap in contemporary American literature that will be difficult to fill.
Portico of Galician Literature 