Edurne Portela

With a degree in History from the Public University of Navarre, she has worked teaching literature and researching in the United States where, until 2015, she was a lecturer in Literature at the Lehigh University, Pennsylvania. In all her work, in both essays and literary production, she writes about violence, memory, and uprooting. In 2006, she published the essay El eco de los disparos: Cultura y memoria de la violencia (The Echo of Shots: Culture and Memory of Violence, Galaxia Gutenberg) in which she inquires into the representation of violence in culture with regard to conflict in the Basque Country. In 2017, she published her first novel, Mejor la ausencia (Absence Is Better, Galaxia Gutenberg, winner of the 2018 Madrid Bookshop Guild Prize) and, in 2019, a second novel, Formas de estar lejos (Ways of Being Afar, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2019). Together with José Ovejero, Portela has also made the documentary Vida y ficción (2017) and she works on a regular basis with such media outlets as the newspaper El País, the digital daily La Marea, and Spanish National Radio.