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The winner of the 2022 Azorín Novel Award, the writer María Zaragoza Hidalgo, has extolled her passion for books and culture in The Library of Fire, a tribute to the librarians and archivists who protected literary heritage during the Civil War. The library of fire is a story set in the Madrid of the thirties in which various characters parade who above all love culture and are strongly committed to its ideals. “In this novel I have put my head, heart and spirit and practically all my life in recent years,” said the author. She highlights that “it is a book that is about books and about people willing to defend them from censors and ignorant people incapable of recognizing their value. Today, new threats have been added to those old threats, among them, the dictatorship of immediacy and brevity, of the quick and short message », she stated.
Tina is the young university student who is the protagonist of the novel, whose passion for books and her curiosity about history will lead her to become part of the Invisible Library, a secret society that protects books at risk from censorship and traffickers. The ravages of the armed conflicts of the Civil War, the role of women, freedom and personal self-realization, love without barriers and culture as synonymous with progress are the great themes of a work that runs through some of the main stages of the Madrid of the time.
María Zaragoza is a narrator and screenwriter with more than a dozen titles to her credit, including novels, comics, storybooks and children’s books, and in her young literary career she has won the XV Ateneo Joven de Sevilla Award and the LVIII Premio Novel Ateneo-City of Valladolid.
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