The City Council awards the IV International Poetry Prize ‘Ciudad de Estepona’ to the author Carmen Rotger

The winning work, ‘Que se contradicen’, has been published by the prestigious publishing house Pre-Textos.

The Estepona Town Hall has awarded the IV International Poetry Prize ‘City of Estepona’ to the Mallorcan author Carmen Rotger for her work ‘Que se contradicen’, published by the prestigious publishing house Pre-Textos.

The award ceremony took place last night at the Mirador del Carmen Cultural Center and featured a performance by the artist José Luis López-Vera.

This literary contest, organized by the City Council of Estepona, has increased for its fourth edition the prize money to 7,000 euros. It was born with a vocation of permanence and has become, despite its youth, a national benchmark. In this fourth edition it has reached a record number of participants with more than 2,000 works submitted.

The jury, which chose the winning work by majority vote, was made up of María Ángeles Pérez López, Luis García Montero, Marta Fernández Vázquez, Juan Gallego Benot, Alberto Conejero López, Ana Fernández-Villaverde, Ben Clark and Manuel Borras Arana, editor of the winning work. They have highlighted that ‘Que se contradicen’ “is a captivating and fascinating book with overflows towards the theatrical, the philosophical and the narrative. It balances, with elegance, great mastery and subtlety, a small number of events that refer to childhood, loneliness, love, time or the self. The voice, which is said and contradicts itself at the same time, carries other voices and in them each of the readers”.

The mayor of Estepona, José María García Urbano, has emphasized the consolidation of this literary award that was born with the vocation of permanence and to which he predicts many years of life given the growing interest that awakens in each edition.

Carmen Rotger was born in Mallorca in 1996. In 2014 she moved to Madrid where she studied Law and International Relations. She has written plays, novels and poetry. She was part of the XVIII Promotion of residents of the Antonio Gala Foundation, and in 2023 she was awarded a scholarship by the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. With her first collection of poems, ‘Que se contradicen’ (Pre-Textos, 2024), she won the IV International Poetry Prize Ciudad de Estepona.