Biography
Fran P. Lorenzo is a Galician writer and journalist. He studied journalism at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He has worked on various Galician newspapers, including Galicia Hoxe and O Correo Galego, and as a press officer for the political party Unidas Podemos in Madrid. He has published two books: the first, Horses and Wolves, is a story of family secrets set in Vigo under Franco’s dictatorship and received the Blanco Amor Prize for long novels in 2014; the second, The Wrong Party, is a selection of political articles first published in Galicia Hoxe, drawing on his political experiences, and came out in 2022. He has his own blog, Un país en lata (A Tinned Country).
Synopsis
Horses and Wolves (192 pages) won the Blanco Amor Award for long novels in 2014. It is set in the city of Vigo in the present and during Franco’s dictatorship. The Beckmanns are a family who have done well under Franco’s regime, but the family hides many secrets, which Paula does not want to leave as a legacy to her son.
Sample
Over fifteen years had passed, and my mother still referred to that summer night in 1960 as the Night of the Fall. This poetic ellipsis turned my father’s suicide into an involuntarily fatal act, and more importantly, spared her the pain of looking for explanations. My father’s death cast a pall over my mother’s soul and turned our apartment in Gran Vía n˚2 into an embassy of wretchedness. Without realizing it, and maybe without meaning to, my father, Ramón Costa, a sales and transport agent and the delegated executor of the Beckmann Family Trust, had inked the final period in a tale that was as much ours as it was his. My name, Paula Costa Beckmann, appears in the first lines of a new saga: I’m the three-year-old girl crying in the dark.
Portico of Galician Literature 