Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive, has been announced as the most recent winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize.
Luiselli, a leading figure in the Latin American literature scene, wrote her most recent novel on the immigration crisis, focusing on refugee children in detention centres between the US-Mexico border while volunteering as a translator.
Luiselli is the first woman to win the prize since its conception in 2013. While the ceremony was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak, Paul Farley, the chair of judges, called upon those watching the live streaming of the announcement to imagine “a podium, flutes of house prosecco, the din of assembled guests and the speeches”.
Of her book, she notes that :“Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken.”
Luiselli continues, that the world we live in now “changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently.
“No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation.”
