Translation Rights TQE / The Guard at the Fiord

In the trail of the applauded volume of short stories Los peces de la amargura, this new volume offers eight stories in which, with an implacable and lucid writing, the circumstances and vital experiences of the characters are tensed to underline what of dramatic and heroic, but also of wretched, atrocious and absurd, exists in the human soul.

In the story that entitles the volume, a middle-aged man is posted to an inhospitable solitary cabin in the shores of a Norwegian fiord to warn any terrorist presence. He will have to remain alert day and night, and this nightmare situation will be intimately related to the maddening guilty of a prison officer. The characters of the other stories do also face extreme situations, not only the serious consequences of the terrorist violence, as the fear that pushes a couple to flee constantly or how the experiences of several people create a mosaic of the tragedy of 11M, but also more intimate situations as the teenager who discovers his father’s moral values during his holidays or the character who confronts the pain of a woman crying on the tube station.

Fernando Aramburu was born in San Sebastián in 1959. He has a degree in Spanish Language, Literature and Linguistics from Zaragoza University. He currently lives in Germany, where he has worked as a Spanish teacher since 1985. His work has been granted, among others, the Ramón Gómez de la Serna Prize 1997, the Euskadi Prize 2001, and for his short stories Los peces de la amargura (The Fish of Sorrow) the XI Mario Vargas Llosa NH Prize, the Dulce Chacón Prize, and the Prize of the Spanish Language Academy. The movie Bajo las estrellas (Under the Stars) based on Aramburu’s novel El trompetista del utopía (The trumpet player of the Utopia) was awarded a Goya Prize in 2008 for best adapted screenplay by the Spanish Cinematographic Academy.