Lourdes Viver Merino, a young writer from Albacete, has won the XXI Jordi Sierra i Fabra Award for Young People. Her winning work, The Echo of the Djinn, is an adventure novel set in a universe populated by gods and creatures from mythology. The jury highlighted the solidity of her narrative world, the work on the setting, and the depth of the secondary characters.
World-Building: The Narrative Architecture Behind Fantasy 🗺️
Creating a coherent fictional universe requires a technical process similar to software development. Internal rules are established (the physics of magic), an extensive lore is designed (the database), and characters with defined motivations are integrated (narrative AI). The balance achieved by Viver between action, emotion, and fantastic elements reflects clear structural planning, where each narrative element serves a function in the overall story system.
Djinns, Gods, and Deadlines: The Epic Battle of the Novice Writer ⏳
While her characters waged cosmic battles against ancestral deities, the author probably faced a more mundane enemy: the blank document. One imagines the struggle between creating a dialect for an ancient race and remembering whether the oven was turned off. In the end, conquering such an award proves that, sometimes, the most complex magic is not summoning a djinn, but finishing a manuscript on time.