APPLICATION LETTER TO THE

ASTRID LINDGREN MEMORIAL AWARD 2015, 2017, 2020 and 2021

OF THE CANDIDATE:

JORDI SIERRA I FABRA

proposed by the CEPLI of the University of Castilla-La Mancha

(Centre for the Study and Promotion of Children’s Reading and Literature), Cuenca (Spain) 

Born in Barcelona in 1947, Jordi Sierra i Fabra has devoted, for more than forty years, his creative effort and talent to writing. He has written books for children and young people specially, but also crime and science fiction, poetry, biography and essay. He published his first book at 25, his first novel at 28 and he says to have been aware of “starting to write decently at 35”. He hit success at 40, has published 400 titles and has sold more than 10 million books all over the world, especially in Spain and Latin America.

A domestic accident when he was only 8 confined him to his bed for quite a long time: his right arm –intact– helped him keep boredom at bay by writing his first story.

“That day I discovered two major truths: the first, that my tongue did not stutter when I wrote (because I was a heavy, really heavy stammerer, one of those who block and grimace and stop breathing); the second, that writing is a lonely, particular and individual act and that one must never, ever, heed anyone, for better or for worse.”

That story, barely three pages long but a whole world for that eight-year-old!, proved to little Jordi that his hand could convey what his mind held, turning it into letters, words and sentences that made sense, without getting “stuck” or blocked.

A second difficulty, morally harder, had Jordi to overcome: his father’s lack of sympathy towards Jordi’s passion for writing. At that time, reading made up for many of the difficulties he had to endure:

“Apart from kitsch and cheap novels, I read cartoons and comics. My heroes were Capitán Trueno, Flash Gordon and Rip Kirby (…). Then we had Hazañas Bélicas and El Jabato. The first novels I read were crime ones (…). My first “proper” teacher was Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Tarzan novels. From him I learned rhythm, how to cut a text into chapters, how to create climaxes and atmospheres. The hero of my childhood, though, was Richmal Crompton’s William Brown. I also devoured Enid Blyton’s works and another of my bedside books was The One Thousand and One Nights.”

A little later, at twelve, Jordi’s wish to become a writer had to get through the stupidity of a Language teacher for whom Jordi’s teenager fantasy and imagination only deserved low marks and despise, at the same time she prophesized his efforts to become a writer would prove useless. May the Providence preserve the sharp eye of such a sensible teacher, wherever she may be!

At 16, Jordi finished his secondary studies, passed the corresponding exam and, already 17, started working by day and studying in the afternoons:

“When my father asked me what I wanted to study, since I neither could pay for my studies nor was smart enough to deserve a scholarship (and needless to say, I couldn’t study humanities, like journalism, because he wouldn’t accept it), I said I wanted to «leave something to the world». The eternal romantic. Expressed like this, it sounds very dramatic, but the circumstances and the time must be considered… The word architecture stemmed naturally. «Making» houses was nice. Buildings last. The bad news are that houses are made, created, by architects. All the rest are only workers. I, stupid of me, even knowing I would never realise what I was studying, because I still stubbornly wanted to become a writer, said I would become a technical architect. Oh my God! When I found out that the WHOLE career was based on Maths… it was too late. I was nearly six years –six!– studying something I neither understood nor loved, something I hated and made me feel even more useless.”

During all those years, he worked in a building company, and never ceased to write. Those were the times of the Beatles, of Woodstock, long hair, hippies, sexual awakening, political fights, civil protests, and Jordi “working eight hours in a prison and studying three more in another. Five years and a half of frustration…” But he didn’t give up and kept on fighting to make his dream of becoming a writer come true.

Discovering the Beatles in 1964 would change his life: “Music took over my whole existence”. He contributed to El Gran Musical, the most relevant musical programme in the history of Spanish radio, which would air the best Spanish pop of the sixties and seventies. He also featured in the magazine under the same title and from 1970 on, was hired by Disco Exprés, after what he started writing theHistoria de la música pop (A History of Pop Music) (1972).

Jordi: Passion for writing

It is difficult to find such a strong vocation for writing as the one Jordi has felt from his childhood, and which has accompanied him all his life without loosing intensity.

“I love literature more than anything else in the world. I will never dream of doing anything that might demean it or make someone reject it.”

Jordi Sierra i Fabra belongs to a generation of authors that, in the decade of the seventies of the 20th century, contributed to an in-depth renovation of Spanish children and young people’s literature, by including issues which had been absent from the genre until that moment. A multi-faceted writer who combines social commitment, realism, imagination and lyricism, his works have tackled social conflict and personal development, with explicit references to the spirit of the times, through storylines that champion ethics, imagination, equality, freedom or justice.

Jordi Sierra i Fabra’s literature is not only diverse in its themes, but also rich in situations, characters, atmospheres, plots, registers and tones. After the earthquake that devastated Chile in the night of the 27^th of February of 2010, in the middle of the Latin American Conference of Children and Young People’s Literature, I was lucky enough to make the trip back to Spain next to Jordi, in our plane’s back row. During that long journey I had the chance to discover his very special way of writing: nothing is left to improvisation, but imagination is preserved; nothing is random, but fantasy is safeguarded; nothing is stale, even if it has appeared in previous works; everything is well-thought and organized, but there is place for creativity; works are documented, but genius takes the lead. Sierra i Fabra has crafted, with patience and effort, a very personal narrative structure for his stories, where characters have their own voice, talk to the narrator and answer to socially recognisable types:

“All my novels are documented; when the idea first occurred to me or its motivation, where and how I prepared the storyline, the day I wrote it and the month it was published.” (Interview with José R. Cortés Criado, in CLIJ, 251, 2013, p. 16).

I could exemplify all this with many of his 400 published books. But I will do it with the one that gave him the National Award of Children Literature, Kafka y la muñeca viajera (Kafka and the travelling doll) (Siruela, 2007), where the writer managed to create, from a suggestive true story, a thoroughly meaningful and moving plot. The real facts are that Kafka, one year before his death in 1925, lived an unusual story when, walking around Berlin’s Steglitz Park, he came across a little girl, Elsi, who was crying in distress because she had just lost her doll. The writer, wanting to calm the child down, but at a loss at what to say to her, made up the story that would inspire Jordi: Kafka told the girl her doll wasn’t lost, but gone on a journey and that he, who was in fact a postman for dolls, would deliver to Elsi on the next day the letter that her doll would surely send. This is how the genius started to write every day, for three weeks, a letter that he himself would read to the little girl. The girl remains unknown and no one has ever read those letters, as has no one been able to account for Kafka’s reasons to make up that story and, specially, to keep it up for so long. In those letters, the writer made the “lost” doll live adventures, anecdotes or experiences throughout the world (Paris, Venice, the Nile…), to comfort the little girl in her absence. The great merit of Sierra i Fabra lies on his ability to create, from that story, an unmistakable epistolary book that also shows his ability to give voice to a little girl –and very plausibly at all that–, each time that, after reading one of the letters, Kafka speaks with her. He also manages to convey to the attentive reader Kafka’s own pleasure at the girl’s happiness when she listens to the invented letters, where her doll describes her last journeys, to the point that the writer declares, when he has already written some letters, that he enjoys doing so. The problem Kafka will encounter in the real story will be how to close it up, that is, how to put an end to his deception. I won’t reveal Sierra i Fabra’s magnificent resolution to the conflict in his novel.

Awards, prizes and commitment to young people

Jordi’s books have earned him several outstanding national and international awards: Barco de Vapor, Gran Angular, Edebé, CCEI, Ateneo de Sevilla, Ciudad de Torrevieja, A la orilla del viento, La Galera, Columna Jove or Cervantes Chico, among many others, having also been proposed as the Spanish candidate to the Andersen Award. In 2013, he was given the Children and Young People’s Literature Latin American Award, awarded by the SM Foundation to the career of a writer of Children and Young People’s Literature in the Latin American arena.

José R. Cortés Criado wrote an excellent thesis on the whole of his work and the Cervantes Virtuallibrary (University of Alicante) has opened an authorial library that can be browsed in the following URL: http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/ portales/sierra_i_fabra

His commitment with young people has found expression in his two foundations (the Jordi Sierra i Fabra Foundation in Barcelona and the Taller de Letras Jordi Sierra i Fabra Foundation in Medellín –Colombia–), as well as in a literary prize for young writers (together with the SM Foundation). The Medellín Foundation promotes and develops social projects on reading and writing which also aim at improving the life quality of children and young people from disfavoured backgrounds. Probably, the difficulties and frustrations Jordi had to overcome as a child have led him to understand this commitment as a moral obligation:

“For years, my house has been open to any boy or girl who wanted to see me, talk to me or interview me for a school project, and also to young journalists, students or bachelors with an interest on my work. When I was a child, I knew loneliness, and what is worse, I knew what it is not to be supported. When I started publishing I swore to myself I would never turn my back to anyone. I have always been true to that.”

The best acknowledgement of Sierra i Fabra’s work is the one given by his readers; for many years now, a good number of his books are compulsory reading in Spanish primary and secondary schools and, as they are read year after year by students, specially in Lower and Upper Secondary, they become but a first stage in the reading interests of these students. If further proof was required, in 2002 the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture published a list of the 10 authors more often read in schools throughout the country. Well, Jordi Sierra i Fabra was on the eighth position with a 21,28%, and only after Bécquer, Delibes, Galdós, Lorca, Baroja, Eduardo Mendoza and García Márquez: Indeed good company! The fact is that Sierra i Fabra’s novels are “guilty” of the inclusion of children and young people’s literature in Spanish classrooms, something unthinkable not so many years ago.

Jordi Sierra i Fabra, Spain’s National Children and Young People’s Literature Award is one of the most solid, versatile and plural authors, and probably the one with a widest corpus of published and translated works in the world, especially in the Iberoamerican area. He has sold more than 10 million books, published in Spanish and Catalan and translated into Galician, Euskera, English, Italian, Chinese, German, or Brazilian among other languages. All his work, and in fact his whole career, is inspired and motivated by a recurrent factor: his passion for literary writing, canalized specially through the teenager novel, with a style of his own that mixes willingness, seriousness, effort, dedication and quality. For all these reasons, the CEPLI, the centre I have the honour to direct, PROPOSES MR. JORDI SIERRA I FABRA as a candidate to the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award 2015, understanding that he holds merits more than enough to deserve it.

Pedro C. Cerrillo

Language and Literature Didactics Chair

CEPLI Director. University of Castilla-La Manch

JORDI SIERRA I FABRA

By Victoria Fernández

Director of the CLIJ Magazine (Cuadernos de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil “Notes on Children and Young People’s Literature”)

With more than 500 published titles and 13 million books sold, Jordi Sierra i Fabra (Barcelona, 1947) is Spain’s most prolific author of books for children and young people, and the author most often read by Spanish teenagers. He is also the only writer of this genre listed by Spain’s Ministry of Education among the “ten authors most read” by students from 12 to 16, next to classics such as Bécquer, García Lorca and Baroja, or contemporaries like Delibes, García Márquez and Eduardo Mendoza.

He is also a rare example of independence and versatility. He writes for children and young people as much as for adults, has touched on all genres and likes saying that he only writes what he wants to write, free from fashion and from the pressure of publishers. His career took off in the rock arena, as a critic, commentator and editor of musical magazines, and his success on this field allowed him to live for his passion: writing.

He describes himself in the following terms: “I always wanted to become a writer, even if I had to take a detour through music. Rock unleashed me, stimulated my freedom, and gave me a name. The rest was easier. I published my first book at 25. I am non conventional, a free shooter, unclassifiable, untallied and individualist, and I like it. I have done nothing other than writing and I don’t expect heaven any more than hell for it. Only the peace brought about by a well-done job. Books, comics, songs, theatre, television, radio, cinema… I would hate being typecast; this is why I always go my own way and declare to be just a storyteller. I also belong to some NGOs. The words that define my ethical code are: peace, love, respect, honesty and hope.”

This is Jordi Sierra i Fabra’s style: clean, direct and frank, in his personal life as much as in literature. That’s why his books flow, and emanate a special frankness that touches teenager readers directly. His is the voice of a true “mate”, older and more experienced, ready to talk of what he knows and to call things by their right name. And who, as a good mate, will never fail his young audience. And this is pervading, and this is convincing.

As convincing as his empathy with young people: he answers to all their letters and emails, talks personally to any new writer asking for advice and his lectures in primary and secondary schools always attract a lot of interest. His commitment with young people and with reading (“no reading, no culture” he likes repeating), led him to create, in 2004, the Jordi Sierra i Fabra Foundation to support young writers, with headquarters in Barcelona, Spain, and Medellín, Colombia –the Foundation there is called Taller de Letras Jordi Sierra i Fabra para América Latina (Writing Workshop Jordi Sierra i Fabra for Latin America). The Foundation grants the Jordi Sierra i Fabra Literary Award for Young Writers, that reached its tenth edition in 2014. It also publishes an online literary magazine (www.lapaginaescrita.com) to help future authors improve their writing skills.

From his very first novels for children and young people in the late seventies –El cazador (The Hunter), El último verano miwok (The Last Miwok Summer), El joven Lennon (The Young Lennon), La balada del siglo XXI (The Ballad of the 21^st Century), La Trilogía de las Tierras (The Trilogy of the Lands) – until today, Sierra i Fabra has tried all registers: science-fiction, crime novel, suspense, humour, fantasy, poetry, biography, etc. From the nineties on, though, his work has been tending to a realist and committed literature which verges on the testimonial. He tackles, crudely but always leaving a place for hope, “hot” subjects that worry him: environment, war, consumerism and globalization, children exploitation, hunger, unemployment and young violence, drugs, family conflicts, cinema and fashion, anorexia, homosexuality. Because, as he himself states: “As a storyteller, I have always been loyally and strongly engaged with life, with human beings, nature and, very especially, with what I feel. I go on writing about what I want to, denouncing what I don’t like and making my readers face themselves, as if my books were a mirror where they can see their own reflection. I guess I have become non grato for those who think books for children and young people must be easy”.

But little seems to care about such judgment Sierra i Fabra, that fusion of old rocker and hippy, as he humorously defines himself. Nor do specialized literary award juries both in Spain and Latin America seem to care either, when they have repeatedly distinguished his work. In the last year, for example, he has received no less than five great awards, three of them honorific, and not only for his literary work, and his influence on Spanish narrative, but also for the task done by his two Foundations: The Cervantes Chico Award, the National Writing Award Lorenzo Luzuriaga, and the outstanding Iberoamerican Children and Young People’s Literature Award, the greatest acknowledgment in the Spanish-speaking area, given by the SM Foundation, OEI, IBBY, CERLALC and OREALC-Unesco.

His choice as a candidate to the Astrid Lindgren Award is a well-deserved recognition to an author with a full, impeccable and coherent career, and to a unique and attractive work, able to keep gaining new readers.

 

THE HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN AWARD CANDIDATURE 2006, 2010, 2020 and 2022


PRESENTATIONS YEAR 2006


CARMEN CALVO
MINISTER OF CULTURA

As the Minister of Culture, it is a great pleasure for me to support Jordi Sierra i Fabraís nomination for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in the category of writer. He is one of our best known and acknowledged authors of young and childrenís literature in Spanish.
His prolific pen has produced a wide bibliography that covers all genres: from science fiction, to mystery novels, through poetry, essay, history, bibliography and music.  A tireless traveller and supreme expert in rock music, his outstanding personality does not go unnoticed, mainly for young people, his most faithful and enthusiastic fans, who eagerly consume his novels and communicate freely with him.  I would also like to point out the recent opening of the Fundació Jordi Sierra i Fabra in Barcelona and Medellin (Colombia) to support youngsters who want to be writers. Bearing in mind all of these things, I consider him to be the ideal candidate for this prestigious award.

Carmen Calvo, Minister of Culture of Spain, 2005

 

ROGELIO BLANCO
GENERAL MANAGER OF BOOKS, FILES AND LIBRARIES

As the General Manager of Books, Files and Libraries I am proud to present the writer Jordi Sierra i Fabra as  candidate for the Hans Christian Andersen Award.
He is the author of over 300 books, of which more than 7 million copies have been sold, his work has been translated into 25 languages, and he has received 24 literary awards. However, these figures can not give credit to his human quality, his enthusiasm, his firm criticism of of unjust situations all over the planet. His literature is a means to create a positive state of opinion amongst youngsters, to make them come out of their passiveness, to shake up their souls and to try and make a better world. Marked by unfortunate personal experiences in his beginings as a writer, in his childhood and adolescence, he tries to stop this from happening to others, and for this reason he has supported solidary projects such as the Fundation and Award bearing his own name, by means of which he tries to stop even just one early literary vocation from falling through. For all these reasons, I consider him to be an ideal candidate who bring together literary productiveness, the love and faithfulness of his readers and a huge torrent of human values.

Rogelio Blanco, General Manager of Books, Files and Libraries, 2005

 

FELICIDAD ORQUIN
NATIONAL AWARD FOR THE REVIEW OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Jordi Sierra i Fabra best represents today a committed form of literature for youngsters, that tries to awake critical awareness in the reader and that is also a testimony of our times. His work is linked to renovating currents of critical realism in young peopleís literature.
Many of his novels are real stories, from immediate historical fact and, therefore, they are not very pleasant stories although they are accessible to the readers thanks to a formal approach which has a pace similar to that of television language and the way in which adolescents express themselves.
The first book that Sierra i Fabra wrote was never published. He was only twelve and had already created  a story that needed in all some five hundred words. But his love for music was stronger and prevailed over literature. The Beatles were his first passion and then the new rock stars. He opened and managed several Spanish emblematic rock magazines and worked as a radio music commentator and reporter who accompanied many music stars on their tours.
His passion for travelling, as well as his knowledge of the wishes, illusions and frustrations of youngsters probably comes from this period.  His journeys are not alien to the wide range and diversity of themes present in his work. Long and constant journeys to other countries, other cultures, other people: a large part of Europe, North, Central and South America, Nepal or China.
His work flows then like a long river also important for its size, and supported by reality, commitment and solidarity, with the honesty to tell what he has seen, as well as through everyday stories of urban youngsters, with their wish for friendship and love, since he is a writer with great skills for dealing with feelings .
His main characters are mostly youngsters and also children of the same age as their readers. Despite their problems, they are positive characters because they know that they move in world that can be changed and improved.
He skilfully handles science fiction, novels that criticize or instruct, or which include touches of humour or intrigue. He is not afraid to approach any subject, however hard it may be, since his delicate sensitivity allows him to find the right tone needed to tell stories that deal with of violence among young people, drugs, refugees, immigration, intolerance, animal in risk of extinction, unfair wars or the suffering of a first love that doesnít work out.
Jordi Sierra i Fabraís work has created a wide community of readers and a phenomenal amount of sales of books for children and youngsters which is uncommon in Spain.
As a first approach to such a vast amount of work, we have selected the following titles:
Strawberry fields, which  deals with the new drugs that are in fashion for youngsters to take.
The Wire Girls, which is about anorexia and the ideal of having a modelís body.
The trilogy , The Cycle of the Earths (El Ciclo de las Tierras), which is about the relationship man-machine in the future.
We will never be rock stars, which is about urban tribes and family violence.
The Music of the Wind, which is about slave children in the Third World.
Friday Night, which is about urban violence and alcoholism.
And finally, two anti-war fables, The Bomb and The Soldier and the Girl.
Jordi Sierra i Fabra has a literary universe of his own, a unique work that covers a wide of territory and an abundant flow of narrative resources. This definitely makeshim well worthy of the Hans Christian and Andersen Award.

Felicidad Orquín, Publisher, specialist in children’s literature and literary criticism, National Award for the Review of Childrenís Literature .

 

A DIFFERENT KIND OF WRITER

Jordi Sierra i Fabra (born 1947, Barcelona, Spain, 1947), is one of the most celebrated and widely-read authors in the Spanish-speaking world. With more than 7 million books sold in his own country, works translated into two dozen languages, 17 international literary prizes, more than 200 published works in Spain and Latin America, many of them best-sellers, he is one of the great narrators storytellers of our time.
Sierra i Fabra, who began his career as a music critic, wrote his first book, the Spanish music reference, Historia de la Música pop (Pop Music history) in 1972. In the late 70s, he founded some of the most important publications in this genre, and published his 2 two definitive music encyclopedias,Historia del Rock (Rock history) and Gran Enciclopedia del Rock de la A a la Z (The Great Rock Enciclopedia from A to Z) . He moved away from music to exclusively dedicate himself to writing and travel. He has achieved notable success in many genres — detective novels, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, essays, history, biography — due to the varied interests that characterize him as writer and his constant thirst for learning althought it is in children´s literature and young adult fiction where he achieved wider popularity. His novels spring from realism and for the past 30 years, young people worldwide have identified themselves with his work. Jordi Sierra i Fabra is required in many schools in Spain and Latin America. He gives 150 lectures a year worldwide, another of his passions, which he combines with his nonstop travel on 5 continents. He travels to learn about people and countries, and absorb the energy he will later on transmit in through his books.
Social consciousness is the main primary characteristic of Sierra i Fabra: the disenfranchised, defence of human rights, absolute pacifism, and freedom. He has written about the child slavery, youth gangs , extinction of indigenous peoples, drugs, teenage violence, refugees, racism, family relations, immigrants, new technologies, etc., always supporting his principles above and giving offering hope in every novel.
A writer by avocation since age 8, he overcame a stutter thanks to the willpower he has always promoted in his work. More than anything. He loves literature.

PRESNTATION YEAR 2020 and 2022

Reasons for this nomination, by Reina Duarte

Publisher Director of EDEBE, former IBBY Vice President and Former member of the HCA Award Jury

It is an honour for me to introduce Jordi Sierra i Fabra to IBBY’s 2022 Hans Christian Andersen Jury as Spanish Author candidate.

My first contact with him was as a reader, when I was a young adult. Then, Spain had lived under a dictatorship for 40 years and my favourite books were always translations from other languages. When I read La Revolución del 32 de Triciembre, by Jordi Sierra I Fabra, I discovered a close and strong voice, someone who spoke with freedom about other young people who wanted to live in peace, making love, not war. Yes, the main characters were hippies, but I had never read a novel about this kind of characters. It was magic!

Some years later, I became an Editor, a Children’s and young adult Editor, and I had the opportunity to meet him in person, to contract his novels, to publish some of his books.

I could speak to all of you about his literature, his subjects, his different points of view, his impressive list of awards and so on. However, when I want to be honest with myself, I have to say that the most important challenge that this big writer has won is other.

He changed a country of readers who had not found books for them. He changed not only my generation as reader, so as person, plus a lot of the following generations (eighties, nineties, millennials), and not only from Spain, from other countries of Latin America too, because he never stops writing, never. And yes, he writes about all the subjects (human rights, ecology, science fiction, love, war, feelings, history…), because he lives with us in the last Century and nowadays, and he is worried about the same things like us.

Jordi Sierra I Fabra is a writer who makes children and young adults fall in love of reading.

María Jesús Gil
IBBY Honorary Member

Dear President and Jury members:

I have been really very fortunate to meet Jordi Sierra i Fabra when I was beginning as an editor of books for children and young people in the 80s. From that times, often waiting on an airport or during long trips across the Atlantic, or having a coffee on my desk, we have shared our points of view on literature in general and, in particular, on that intended to be read by children and young people. In addition, I have had the honour of publishing a good number of his most outstanding works.

I would like to share with you some of my impressions about Jordi’s work. To begin with, and to understand better his work, I consider relevant what the author says about himself:

“I have always been an impenitent traveler, a devourer of images and words, a perplexed visionary, frightened, happy, in love and above all in solidarity with what I have seen. I am also an astonished child who does not renounce to dreams, utopia and the passion to imagine that all could be inside a book. I firmy believe that hope is the great weapon of our faith. But we must feed our hope with acts, gestures, help, strength, and words. That is why every book we write is an act of faith and hope. And each reader is the final reward.”

This statement summarizes well what the author has devoted to his extensive work in which, through all genres, science fiction, poetry, crime fiction, humor, fantasy etc … has touched on very diverse topics: war , the labor exploitation of children (The Music of the Wind ), drugs, slavery, refugee children (The wings of the sun), organ transplantation, youth violence, drugs, intolerance, racism, emigration, the power of new technologies , animals in danger of extinction, some of the great issues that have plagued Latin America in recent decades: the Chilean and Argentine dictatorships (The Memory of Lost Beings), the extinction of indigenous tribes in Brazil, the struggle in Chiapas (A Man with a Fork in a Land of Soups) and the massacres of peasants in Guatemala. A recurring theme on his work is the problems faced by youth as in Friday night, We Will Never be Rock Stars, Six Stories about Mario or Fields of Strawberries.

Jordi deals with all these topics through a well documented literature rich in situations, creating atmospheres, plots and strong and credible characters.
When studying Jordi’s work it is important to take into account his three great hobbies: music, travelling and cinema, which will be one of the main sources of inspiration for his literature.

During his lecture at the 27th IBBY International Congress in Cartagena de Indias in 2002, the author said: “My commitment is based on telling what I have seen and fighting for what I believe in”. “There are authors who assume the risk of being less pleasant and more real, because we have gone through a world that only showing it can be improved by future generations. That is our commitment. ” “I advocate that we also accept the commitment to tell the truth wherever we are and offer it to our readers with passion and honestly.”

His commitment is based on being honest and writing what he have seen and in denouncing unfair situations to try to get a better world for children and young people.

As a result of this commitment to literature and young people, Jordi has obtained the highest awards in Spanish language such as The National LIJ Award for “Kafka and the Traveling Doll” in 2007, the Cervantes Chico in 2012, the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts in 2017, the Creu de Sant Jordi of the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2018, and the considered the most important prize in Spanish language: The Ibero-American Prize in 2013. This Prize is summoned annually by the SM Foundation together with the following institutions: Centro Regional for the Promotion of Books in Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLALC), International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI), and the Regional Office of Education for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO / OREALC); with the collaboration of the International Book Fair of Guadalajara (FIL), where the prize is presented.

I would like to highlight a paragraph of the Jury minutes:
“The outstanding renovating will, the tireless creativity and the
overflowing versatility of the set of his work, as well as his
agile style, direct and clear, which is close to readers of
the different Spanish-speaking countries, having transcended their
novels to other languages ​​through multiple translations published in Europe, Asia, America and Oceania. Many of Jordi’s novels are already classics of the LIJ. I would like to make a special mention to the fact many of them are about sensitive and conflictive topics that interest and concern young readers, as well as about the defence of human rights and movements changing our society ” .

For all these reasons, I firmly believe that Jordi Sierra i Fabra is an extraordinary candidate for the highest award, the Andersen Prize, and I would ask you to consider his whole work that way.

Thank you so much.
Kind regards,