Those who read these articles in the paper edition will quickly have understood the title. I have the honor of sharing the page with the writer Olga Merino. The Royal Spanish Academy has just awarded her the prize for literary creation for her novel ‘La outsider’. Merino makes a literature that they will like. She combines an overwhelming knowledge of the literary tradition with a street-level view. Wisely mixes the sublime (in terms of canonical) with the vulgar (in terms of everyday). And from that mix comes a universe in which the reader feels at home, but enriched by everything that has been written about what he feels and suffers.
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Merino has come to imaginative literature from the literature of observation, that is, to novels from newspapers. She was a correspondent for EL PERIÓDICO in Moscow and a reporter in Barcelona. Some dimwits mark an impregnable frontier between literature and journalism. The great ones know that there is a continuity. Josep Pla, one of the most cited and least read authors, explained that there are two types of literature: imaginative and observational. Both share the same nature: they are a story, although the narrative rules are not the same without becoming contradictory. The most decisive thing about writing is the look. And there journalism enriches. No matter how fantastic a story is, it always starts from reality to recompose it. And that is what journalism does on a daily basis when it does it well. For this reason, the fact that the academy recognizes good literature in someone we recognize as a good journalist is a source of pride and satisfaction, as the emeritus would say.
It is a luxury for newspapers to have literary narrators among their opinion contributors. Almost all the great Russian novelists, admired by Merino, started out in journalism like Olga. Newspapers and books, on paper or digital, we share readers, so it is logical that we share authors. And projects like ‘April’, the literary supplement of Prensa Ibérica, are born from those shared territories, in which Merino also collaborates. You have to get to know the neighbors and treat them well because in the end they always get you out of trouble, in this case because they inspire or provoke you. Thank you, Olga, for sharing your literature with the EL PERIÓDICO community.