Winner of the 2025 National Poetry Prize, the writer Míriam Reyes, born in Spain, emigrated to Venezuela and recently returneddebuts in the story The infinite agea title that refers to the age at which “You stay forever” and in his case it was eight years old when he emigrated with his family from Galicia to Venezuela.
“This big break can have many causes, it can come from a trauma, a strong experience or for any other reason. But when I talk about myself, I can say this.” There’s an eight-year-old girl inside me“said Reyes (Ourense, 1974) on the occasion of the presentation of his first novel.
The book, a hybrid that contains narrative, but also diary, historical chronicle and historytalks about the phenomenon of Emigration and “uprooting”.
The infinite age (Editorial Tránsito) is defined on the back as a “learning novel” the confession of love for a host country and the testimony of mourning for the “lost paradise”.
However, Reyes avoids “labels” that are not part of his thinking: “I’m not saying that labels are good or bad, but that my head doesn’t work that way either in literature or in life in general. All I can say is that it’s not about poetic prose,” he says.
His origins have a lot to do with the story his novel tells an eight-year-old girl who left Galicia in 1983 and he gets on a plane to land on the other side of the ocean, more specifically in Venezuela, and There, discover what it means to be a foreigner first and a migrant second.
This girl, the narrator, is telling – or remembering – her experiences in a new country, her new life. However, Reyes says he wants to “transcend” his personal experiences to talk about the “transformative process of migration.”
The novel thus establishes “Equivalence relations between the girl and the country”, A story that progresses in the same way as the young woman’s integration process in Venezuela.
“There is everything that you lose and that you see that you are losing and that you let go of in order to move forward; and on the other hand, everything that is new that you discover, everything that you gain and everything that you are grateful for,” he explains.
Reyes has reviewed this entire process since adulthood. the desire for belonging that ends in uprootingthe adoption of a country that has been a magnet for migration around the world, but as soon as it arrives it loses its economic stability and begins to be a country drowning in debt.
The author reveals that the novel captures the difference between the experiences of parents, “which They wanted to earn money and use it to return to their country“, and that of the girl whose desire is to “learn names” and learn a new language.
In his novel The protagonist reveals the outstanding settlements with the country that took her inwith his past, but “not out of nostalgia or epic.”
It is also a story of uprooting Reyes eventually fled Venezuelawhich became a country of “exodus” from which more than eight million people left.
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