Eli Ríos

Biography

Eli Ríos is a Galician writer, born in London, who moved to Galicia at an early age. Her best-known works of adult fiction are Monday (2017) about a woman, Nerea, whose life is turned upside down when she is diagnosed with breast cancer, which won the Torrente Ballester Award; Potato Omelette (2019), winner of the Modesto R. Figueiredo Award, a call to sisterhood and equality; and The Sky of Bars (2019) about two women in prison. She is an accomplished poet whose collections have won numerous prizes, most recently the Gonzalo López Abente (Guilty, 2017) and the Miguel González Garcés (No Omelette Is Bad, 2019). She was responsible for a biography of María Victoria Moreno, author of Anagnorisis (1988) and the subject of Galician Literature Day in 2018.

Synopsis

Potato Omelette (84 pages) is a short novel aimed at stirring readers’ consciences and at bringing about a fairer society. It is a denunciation of male violence against women in the home. It won the Modesto R. Figueiredo Award in 2014 and has an introduction in the Galician edition by the author Emma Pedreira.

Sample

When everything is over, it’s so easy to look back and see your mistakes. When you look at things from another person’s perspective, it’s easy too. The hard part is acting the way your gut tells you to at the exact moment things are happening. In real time. At the exact same moment. That Wednesday morning I remember thinking how much I hated eggs that still had bits of chicken shit on them. Sure it was quite natural and all that, but the only thing I could think of was that I was going to eat something that had come out of an animal’s butt. A chicken’s butt. That was really, really filthy, was the best you could say about it, it was the filthiest thing ever! After that, like I’ve already said, a thousand and one times, I don’t remember what happened very well. I beat the eggs so I could get the nastiest part out of the way and when I went to cut the potatoes up, they weren’t there. I could swear I’d put them on the table, but they weren’t there. Impossible. I searched all the cupboards, but there wasn’t even a bag of the fried ones I sometimes used in an emergency. The only solution was to head to Milucha’s store. I ran into Moncho on the steps on the fourth floor as he was coming home from work. And he got mad. And we argued. And he pushed me. And I fell. And I hurt my head really bad and I didn’t die because it wasn’t my time to go as much as I wanted to. In those cases, what one wants and what actually happens are like two different worlds. That was probably the first time I felt they were close to me, but I didn’t know it yet. I wasn’t aware. They were trying to tell me something, but I wasn’t ready to listen to them.