Some prize!

Elena emailed this morning to share her terrific news: she's been awarded the the Eduardo Mallea Municipal Award of Buenos Aires for her novella, Otro lugar (Another place), published by Ediciones de Copista. Ratty has decided to give her his almost entirely uneaten (and generally peculiar-looking) apple as a token of his estimation. This is a prestigious award, a fantastic reward for her beautiful novella. Congratulations, Elena!

You'll have to agree, it's nicely timed, too, as we ready ourselves to release our novel, Amigas, our happy experiment, as Elena so aptly puts it. She wrote (I paraphrase), an experimental work may turn out a little uneven, but it is necessary and good. "We did something important, you know? We made our little piece of sand. I am very happy with our work." And so am I.

Without knowing it at the time, we made a novel that is entirely fitted to the new technology of the ebook (with internal links that can carry the bilingual reader from English to Spanish and back again). ("Sin saberlo nosotras, estábamos escribiendo un libro que sólo podía publicarse como ebook si queríamos que se apreciara el modo experimental en el que lo escribimos.") By the time we'd finished writing it, Rosa Mira Books was up and running; we decided to publish here.

Checking the the ePub file the other day (yes, the eternally-penultimate version is being sent to and fro again today for checking and fixing), I realised we were in danger of contravening copyright by quoting freely from the Beatles song our teenaged characters sing together in the airport in Rome in 1969. So I cut the words right back (you're allowed to quote song titles); the reader will have to add words and music

Meanwhile, here's Joe Cocker singing 'With a Little Help From My Friends' live in Berlin. (Thanks, Elena. I found it on your FB page.)