“She has created her own narrative style,” was what the jury’s statement noted when awarding the National Literature Prize to Cynthia Rimsky (63), which in 2026 again went to narrative. The author of Poste restante, Yomurí or Clara y confusa is one of the most groundbreaking voices in national literature, precisely due to a writing style based mainly on questions, a fluctuating narrative that does not fear exploration.
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Back at her residence in Argentina, she takes some time to talk to Culto about her feelings on becoming the seventh woman to receive the award in the entire history of the prize.
“Regarding being the seventh woman, the arena is rising and it will be impossible to stop seeing the beach. But watch out! The horizon is that at some point, hopefully soon, we stop counting how many men or women and just talk about the National Literature Prize plain and simple. I would like to be alive to see it.”
-What was the first thing you thought when you were told you had won it?
-Complicity with Hugo Herrera Pardo, who was the leader of this nomination along with the Catholic University of Valparaíso; disbelief, strangeness, joy, and hope that literary projects that dare to experiment—and which were avoided being awarded throughout Chile’s history, including Pedro Lemebel—would gain access to the National Prize.
-The jury highlighted that you have built “a unique and recognizable way of narrating stories.” Do you feel you have found that unique way of writing or do you feel you are still exploring it?
-Of course, I am exploring. I have only written eleven books, eleven searches, eleven challenges in each one. And that spirit is what is recognizable in the books: the idea of continuing to challenge and challenge myself.
-The statement also notes that your books do not easily fit into categories like novel, chronicle, autobiography, travel diary, or essay. Do you agree with that view of your work?
-Since Poste restante I started experimenting with documentary materials with the purpose of blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality. I was trained in a world where truth still existed and now I am in a world where falsehoods are passed off as truths. Facing both, I build stories where doubt, confusion, questions, error, inaccuracy, and irony prevail.
-You are the seventh woman to receive it. What is your take on the female presence in this recognition throughout the history of the prize?
-That about 43 women writers are missing (laughs). But I also see a trap in this: women writers are not read and awarded because they are women but because of their books. If attention had to be drawn to inequality of conditions, it is because there is a historical segregation that allowed us to be omitted.
-Very recently you also received the Herralde Prize for Clara y confusa. How do you experience this succession of recognitions after a career that for a long time developed quite on the margins of the major consecration circuits?
-Imagine, until El futuro es un lugar extraño publishers rejected my manuscripts, even independent ones. So it was a rather painful margin. And that is what many writers— not only in Chile—experience who do not fit the formats that prevail with trends or who do not want to or are not good at social relations, chasing editors, etc. I would love for this prize to generate a multiplying effect and for readers to open up to these writings where the central thing is not to understand the plot but to enjoy the writing, the invention, to feel, to imagine through the books.
-Do you feel any closeness to any Chilean literary tradition?
-I have a lot of closeness to the Chilean tradition; there are little pieces of every Chilean writer in me, not to replicate what they did, but to incorporate twists, confusions, detours, tensions that build new readings of that tradition and keep it alive and kicking.
Poste restante was born from a photo album found at a flea market and a trip through Europe. Was the idea from the beginning that a story can arise from an object, an image, or an accident?
-It was kind of a coincidence, like all my books, but I was also reading, prompted by Rita Ferrer, the travel chronicles of Walter Benjamin. I was very mental and couldn’t finish any text until I discovered—thanks to him—that you can write about Russia starting from borscht, for example. To give up the global, go to the particular, the detail, the infra-ordinary, as Pérec says. From there I started building a way to work writing from materiality, situated experience, as Lihn says, and not from ideas or plots, and above all from error.
-Travel has an important dimension in your work, in books like Ramal or La revolución a dedo you chronicle it, do you see yourself as a traveling writer? What aspects of those trips marked you and pushed you to write about them?
-I love adventure, my first readings were adventures, I dreamed of being an adventurer, and I traveled to fulfill that desire. Then the adventure moved to writing and imagination, I love inventing procedures, I don’t ask myself how the story advances, I ask how I tell a scene, what I invent to tell it, and how that invention leads me to an unknown place. In that sense, today I can deviate, venture, get lost, without having to travel a real path; the journey has turned into fiction.
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-Just as you wrote La revolución a dedo in which you narrated your experience of the Nicaraguan revolution at 20 years old, what current world process do you find interesting to narrate?
-I am working with hate speech, and with that idea they try to impose of the Inexorable, that the state of things is unchangeable, that human beings cannot change what happens.
El futuro es un lugar extraño returns to the dictatorship but from a very different perspective than the traditional testimonial or historical novel. In a way, your literature is political, do you consider that this can be the main reading of your work?
-I call it my political trilogy: La revolución a dedo, El futuro es un lugar extraño and Yomurí. Unlike other political writings, I am fundamentally interested in dismantling the epic, asking uncomfortable questions, not working with memory but with forgetting, which seems less official to me; focusing on minor characters and situations, far from power and discourses, scratching the surfaces and, above all, humor, irony, I love that readers laugh when reading my books.
-In some way, you have explored other ways of narrating, different from the usual, where not everything necessarily resolves or is linear. How have you built that path?
-I write to discover what I don’t know. Not to put in writing the little I know and feed my ego. I am not interested in reaching a goal, discovering a truth or a solution, I am interested in the path, the process. Real life does not have the structure of conflict, development, climax, solution. There are no antagonists and protagonists, there are simultaneous focuses all the time, problems we never solve that coexist with others that come and go with different intensities. That order some seek in literature does not exist.
-Regarding the above, are you interested in other ways of narrating originating from other latitudes and cultures?
-Of course, I am curious. I love how language works, sayings, proverbs, humor, ways of seeing.
-What things about Chile could you see more clearly from Argentina? How has distance changed your perspective?
-A few years ago I made a selection and a prologue for a book with stories by Marta Brunet and discovered that she lived several years in Argentina, near the Sur group, and it was there that she changed her way of writing, moved away from criollismo and found a poetics of inquiry. Brunet returns to Chile happy with her new book under her arm and Alone destroys it.
-How has living in Argentina influenced your literature? Are there elements of that literary tradition that have influenced your work?
-Of course. For example, in Chile they sell cold cuts in the supermarket, thickly sliced from who knows when, and they look at you badly if you ask for less than 1/4 kilo and throw it in a plastic bag however it falls. In Argentina you ask the deli clerk for 100 grams and he cuts very thin slices that he artfully places on a plastic sheet and puts another sheet on top to make a second row. All that he wraps in paper and ties with a twist tie. In La Serena I once bought a tray of candied papayas that my mother loves so much and, instead of the usual second row of papayas, there was a thick cardboard simulating something that didn’t exist.
You have also developed important work leading literary workshops and teaching at universities. How has that experience been for you?
-I like working with students, seeing how they transform, how they discover little things, the questions they ask themselves. Above all, I like teaching at a public and free university.
-Can you teach how to write a good novel or can you only help someone discover what novel they want to write?
-The latter, of course.
-Finally, how do you currently see Chilean literature?
-I see it healthy, restless, alive, what I miss are collective positions and actions to defend acquired rights and rethink others. Today culture and the arts are in danger, not only in Chile. It is no longer useful to save oneself alone.
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