Biography
Inma López Silva teaches dramatic theory at the Galician School of Dramatic Art and holds a doctorate in Galician philology. Her work varies between novels such as Concubines (2002), awarded the Xerais Prize for best novel, and Memory of Cities without Light (2008), awarded the Blanco Amor and San Clemente Prizes, and books of a more intimate nature such as diaries about her experiences living in New York (New York, New York, 2007) and becoming a mother for the first time (Maternosofia, 2014). She has published two collections of short stories, Roses, Crows and Songs (2000) and Ink (2012). She has translated work by the French authors Albert Camus and Jean Genet into Galician, and is active on the Galician political stage.
Synopsis
Memory of Cities without Light (340 pages) is the memoir of a child who is forced to flee Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War with his adoptive mother, Lucía. They settle in Paris, where the boy becomes a famous actor, but is haunted by the ghosts of his past. The book is divided into five parts and an epilogue.
Sample
The day I was left alone, I had two options: to run until I choked and fainted, or to carry on huddled beneath the bed so that I could stay alive. I chose to remain where I was, looking out between the tassels of the bedspread and the floor, and everything changed and became unpredictable.
I saw one of those things children are not supposed to see.
That was the first time I wished I could go blind, despite the fact I’d never met any blind people at all, or poets on the stage, spies, paid mourners who pluck out their eyes, prophets, saintly women, or just women who later die, forgotten, in large cities. That night, when I was five, I wished I could go blind simply so that I wouldn’t have to watch my family die again. I’d already learned the expression ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over’, and I thought it was true.
Portico of Galician Literature 