A (literary) coronation of glory: Gabriela Cabezón Cámara wins US National Book Award

Another day, another coronation of glory for Argentina, goes the meme born in the country’s sprawling digital world (if you’re interested, here’s an explanation of the concept). It wasn’t sports or culinary greatness that bagged the prize this time, but culture: Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s We Are Green and Trembling won the 76th National Book Award in the Translated Literature category.  Cabezón Cámara is the third Argentine to win the award, following Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch in 1967 (the first winner in that category) and Samantha Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses in 2022. Together with the Man Booker Prize, it is considered the top literary prize in the English language. The 2025 winners were announced in a ceremony last Wednesday, where Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) topped the Fiction category.  Cámara gave an acceptance speech at the event where she received the award. “I’ll speak in Spanish because I know some fascists don’t like that,” Cámara said, adding that she wanted to express her gratitude to Argentine public education and its workers.  “Without free and public education, working-class people like me would never ever be able to stand here,” she stated. The awarded book We Are Green and Trembling is based on the true story of Catalina de Erauso, a former nun born in 1592 in the Basque Country. She would eventually flee the convent and transition to a male military officer and conquistador in America named Antonio de Erauso. In the New World, Antonio’s story sees him rescue two Guaraní girls from enslavement and suffer persecution, as he is hounded by the army he deserted. Winner of the 2024 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, the most renowned prize for novels published in Spanish and written by a woman, the novel is described by New Directions Publishing as “a queer baroque satire, a surreal picaresque rich with wildly imaginative language and searing critique of subjugation, colonialism, and tyranny of all kinds.”  Poet Robin Myers, the book’s English translator, with whom the writer will share the US$10,000 prize, stood next to Cámara on the ceremony stage. She translated Cámara’s statement and described the novel as dealing with “the infinite diversity and mutability of language over time, the scorch of colonialism, the power of tenderness, and the ability of the natural world to exist and resist beyond human horror.”   A key figure in contemporary Latin American literature, Cabezón Cámara graduated from the University of Buenos Aires and worked as a culture journalist for many years, writing for several Argentine media outlets like Página12, Le Monde diplomatique, and Revista Ñ. She also sat as a Culture editor for Clarín newspaper. Ever since the publication of her first novel Slum Virgin, she has explored characters on the margins of society and themes like prostitution, the gaucho tradition, and trans women.  A previous novel of hers, The Adventures of China Iron —  a re-write of the classic folk poem Martín Fierro from a feminist, LGBT, postcolonial point of view — was praised by The New York Times and shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. Both novels have been translated into English and published by Charco Press.