Daniela Ferrández Pérez, postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, has been distinguished at the Follas Novas do Libro Galego Awards. Her work «A Defunción dos sexos: disidentes sexuais na Galiza contemporânea» was awarded in the category "Ensaio e investigación" [Essay and research].

It is an informative book that collects stories and memories of people who lived outside the sexual norm in Galicia in the last hundred and fifty years. Through archival and journalistic sources, the author reflects on some of the itineraries that these people had to travel and their confrontation with the yoke of a compulsory sexuality that condemned them to ostracism and the margins.

This work stems from the premise that the hidden drawer in which history has deposited sexual dissidents is an essential step towards articulating an LGBT memory in Galicia today. To this end, the development of the work has not focused on an exhaustive account of sexual and gender dissent in each of the periods investigated, configuring these rather as small windows from which stories and memories of diverse people are extracted. Persecuted, accepted, tolerated or repressed people. Lives, after all, necessary for a current and collective reflection on the past, present and future of the sexual dissidents that today populate Galicia.

The Follas Novas Awards are a joint initiative of the Asociación de Escritores en Lingua Galega (AELG), the Asociación de Editoras Galegas (AEG) and the Federación de Librerías de Galicia. Eighty works were entered in the 2023 edition.

[More information about the distinguished work published in El Diario newspaper.]