Marina Perezagua


Marina Perezagua is a writer and an open water swimmer. She was born in Seville, Spain. She graduated in Art History from the University of Seville. She obtained her PhD in philology in the United States and later on she became a professor of language, literature, history and Latin American cinema at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Afterwards she worked for two years at the Instituto Cervantes de Lyon. Today she lives in New York and works as a professor at New York University. Her last book was illustrated by the international acclaimed painter Walton Ford, who the same year made the cover for the album GRRR! by the Rolling Stones. She is a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.

Works

For Marina Perezagua, the literary genre known as short story should not be considered or referred to only as a fragment or part of a book, but as an independent piece that features the very literary and narrative essence as it becomes published autonomously from a novel. Perezagua uses cruelty and unrest in her works and presents those concepts as a rejection of the absurd belief that they are essential for man, just as she often presents the beauty of brutality in her books.
Many critics and references to her works underline Perezagua's instinctive nature of writing as the language used in her works does not involve sophisticated words and it does not seek to satisfy the reader, but sheds a narrative instinct in her words and books.
For Perezagua is essential to have a clear final previously planned for each work because it gives her certain control as she writes and allows her to "hold everything in every part, from the beginning, in every line". As for the accuracy of the narrative, Marina considers that it needs to serve the imagination: "I am interested in scientific writing at the level of speculation and invention." In her books miscegenation between good and evil, men and women, animals and people is commonly used. Marina says that the best creation is when you take the best of each specie or object and create a perfect fusion, following some guidelines and not randomly.

Prizes