Ileana Garma wins the Agustín Yáñez National Short Story Award

Ileana de Jesús Garma Estrella, originally from Mérida, Yucatán, is the winner of the XIX Agustín Yáñez National Short Story Award, for her work “How to live alone after 40”, signed under the pseudonym Simple Machines. The foregoing was announced by the Head of Language and Literature of the Jalisco Ministry of Culture, through the minutes of the jury published on the official website of the agency.

The jury, made up of Ave Barrera García, Marcos Hiram Ruvalcaba Ordoñez and David Miklos Landesmann, chose the text by Iliana de Jesús Garma Estrella, because “it is constructed like a storybook, where an intimate and non-romanticized approach to motherhood stands out , as well as family life, grounded in the territory of fiction, through a prose that favors clarity, managing to convey the symbolic and narrative force of the anecdote, maintaining a diaphanous style”.

The Agustín Yáñez National Short Story Prize, which is awarded and promoted individually by the Jalisco Ministry of Culture, is one of the most important in the country and has been received by the country’s most outstanding authors in the last two decades.

The winner, who will receive an economic stimulus of 150,000 pesos, studied Visual Arts at the Superior School of Arts of Yucatan. She is a graduate of the School of Literary Creation of the General Society of Writers of Mexico (Sogem). She has published 29, Holidays and other stories, Tenderness, 7 Poetic Work and The State of Siege.

She has been a scholarship holder of the Fonca (2013-2014), in the specialty of poetry, and of the Pecda (2018), in the specialty of painting.