“ The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena… a fragile, lonely speck in the dark .” Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
Haunting and elegiac, Luis López Carrasco’s exceptional debut The White Desert is an inventive, confronting portrait of what life on Earth today looks like at a distance, and of our shared fate among the stars when everything feels precarious at best. A stirring reflection on our place in the cosmos, this Herralde Novel Prize-winning book examines connection and loss against a backdrop of quiet catastrophe.
Virginia Mendoza’s The Search for Water tells the story of human history through our constant search for water. From flows of migration, agriculture and pagan rain gods to contemporary struggles with drought and climate change, her hybrid of essay, historical anthropology and memoir is a gripping and inventive history of humankind as driven and united by one force: thirst.
Luis López Carrasco is an award-winning filmmaker and writer. Co-founder of the audiovisual collective Los Hijos, his work has been screened at numerous international festivals. His film The Year of Discovery awards including the Goya Awards for best documentary film and best editing. Virginia Mendoza grew up in La Mancha, Spain, the driest region in Europe. She has published books on roots and uprooting in which she fuses narrative journalism and rural anthropology, such as Quién te cerrará los ojos , Heridas del viento , and Detendrán mi río . In 2019 she won the Manuel Iradier Prize for Communication, awarded by the La Exploradora Geographic Society.
Presented in partnership with Cervantes and the Embassy of Spain in Ireland.