Reading... Elena Medel

Instituto Cervantes Manchester and Leeds Poetry's Club starts 2023 reading Spanish poet Elena Medel, with whom we will have the chance to talk and comment on her poems.

Elena Medel was born in 1985 in Cordoba and lives in Madrid. She is the author of the poetry collections Mi primer bikini (2002; translated into English and Swedish), Tara (2006) and Chatterton (2014), collected in Un día negro en una casa de mentira (2015); the non-fiction books El mundo mago (2015) and Todo lo que hay que saber sobre poesía (2018); and the novel Las maravillas (2020), translated into fifteen languages. Among other awards, she has won the XXVI Loewe Prize for Young Poets, the Princess of Girona Foundation Arts and Literature Award 2016 for the whole of her work, the Francisco Umbral Prize for the Best Book Of The Year 2020 and the Leonardo 2021 grant from the BBVA Foundation. She was a writer in residence at the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center. She is the editorial director at the poetry imprint La Bella Varsovia, which she founded at the age of nineteen.