María Sánchez is a Spanish writer, veterinarian and the author of Cuaderno de campo (Field Notebook), Almáciga: Un vivero de palabras de nuestro medio rural (Seedbed), and Tierra de mujeres: Una mirada íntima y familiar al mundo rural (Land of Women), a bestseller in Spain, with translations into French and German. Her poetry and prose have been translated into English, French, Portuguese, English, Slovakian, German, Romanian and Polish. She is a regular contributor to publications on literature, feminism, and rural culture.
Among other prizes, she has been awarded the Orgullo Rural prize by the Board of Trustees of the Rural Studies Foundation «for being a bridge for the dissemination of the rural world», the National Youth Culture Prize by the Spanish Youth Institute (INJUVE) for having contributed with her poetry «to making visible, in an exemplary and innovative way, the need to maintain life in the countryside», FADEMUR 2019 award from the Federación de Asociaciones de Mujeres Rurales (FADEMUR) for her fight for rural women, Córdoba en Igualdad 2020 in the Art and Culture category from the Diputación de Córdoba, and Artes y Letras 2021 award from the Fundación Princesa de Girona for her work as a poet, writer and activist in defence of rural culture, and especially the forgotten role of women in the countryside.
Cuaderno de campo (La Bella Varsovia, 2017) is her first collection of poems. Tierra de mujeres, is her first essay, a text on women and the rural environment (Seix Barral, 2019), translated into French (Rivages, 2020), German (Blessing Verlag, 2021) an English (spring 2022, University Trinity Press). Almáciga (Geoplaneta, 2020) is a small nursery of words from the rural environment in the different languages of our territory that continues to live and grow in virtual format.
A bestseller memoir in Spain that calls us to reexamine how we view women and rural life
«María Sánchez is obsessed with what she cannot see. As a field veterinarian following in the footsteps of generations before her, she travels the countryside of Spain bearing witness to a life eroding before her eyes — and people slipping a words, practices, way because of depopulation, exploitation of natural resources, inadequate environmental policies, and development encroaching on farmland and villages. Sánchez, the first woman in her family to dedicate herself to what has traditionally been a male domina ted profession, rebuffs the bucolic narrative of rural life often written by — and for consumption by — people in cities, describing the multilayered social complexity of people who are proud, resilient, and often misunderstood. Sánchez interweaves family st ories of three generations with reflections on science and literature. She focuses especially on the often dismissed and undervalued generations of women who have forgone education and independence to work the land and tend to family. In doing so, she asks manifesto, difficult questions about gender equity and labor. Part memoir and part rural feminist Land of Women acknowledges the sacrifices of Sánchez’s female ancestors who enabled her to become the woman she is. A bestseller in Spain, Land of Women pro mises to ignite conversations about the treatment and perception of rural communities everywhere.»
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Some texts in English:
–The caring hand in Topia Magazine, an excerpt from Land of Women, translated by Curtis Bauer.
–For a feminist of sisters of the land (Manifesto for rural women for 2023)
–Moderation of light in The Brooklyn Rail, a text about margins, translated by Lubbock Scapes Collective.
–Genealogy Of The Stain in Oxford American; a poem translated by Curtis Bauer
–An invisible narrative, in Orion Magazine, an excerpt from Land of Women, translated by Curtis Bauer.
–The next world, in Asymptote journal, translated by Bella Bosworth, is a collection of letters that the writer sends some Sundays on the online tool TinyLetter.
–Lichen: A story of fish and nature, of drought and reservoirs, of stones and voices, based on the words of Donna Haraway. With Maria Arnal and Irene Solà.
–For a feminist of sisters of the land (Manifesto for rural women for 2022)