PERU NATIONAL LITERATURE AWARD 2025 – SHORT STORY CATEGORY

The ten stories included in this book circle in formation around certain obsessions related to reality; our perception of it and the capacity of language to represent it. The act of storytelling thus becomes a quest for revelation whose rejection of conventional tropes is similar to that of the Japanese artist who paints pigeons in Paris, a girl overwhelmed by a suspiciously facile outbreak of happiness, or the teenage boy who, under the tutelage of his blind neighbours, realizes that a catastrophic never-ending winter looms.
Within these tales of exile and estrangement, there is also room for memories of the terrible violence and disorientation of migration in a constantly shifting world. Voices that reappear as dreams or mirages hidden in shells on the beach destined to be listened to in the middle of a war. Echoes across the voracious, indefatigable deserts of guilt and death that plague every corner of the human experience.
In the books of Carlos Yushimito, the protagonist is always language and its conceptual ability to find territory that didn’t exist until the author put a name to it. That territory is sometimes Japan, Brazil, Peru or the UK but can also be land that only becomes real when brought to life by the creative energy of an imagination dedicated to expressing itself in its own unique way.