Katya Adaui: “Perhaps the real vacation is the one spent at home reading.”

“Being a traveler isn't the same as being a tourist, although it's increasingly difficult to spot the differences,” reflects Katya Adaui (Lima, 1977) during one of her visits to Barcelona. She wonders how she feels about this displacement. “I'm probably just another tourist, even though I come for work.” Indeed, she's here to present Un nombre para tu isla (A Name for Your Island) (Páginas de Espuma), the collection of short stories that earned her a finalist in the Ribera del Duero short story award and which follows her win of the 2023 Peruvian National Literature Prize.

The statement she makes during a meal with journalists is not trivial. Her book not only addresses this issue but also invites readers to become travelers and distance themselves from mass tourism. “I believe that if you immerse yourself in these texts, you will achieve it,” the Peruvian author living in Argentina, who is increasingly aware of how tourism affects cities, is convinced. “They become something homogeneous. There are many factors, but cruises and all-inclusive hotels are largely to blame. They are two of the things that terrify me the most.”

“I just want to go to places where a friend is waiting for me.”

While these are topics that often cross her mind, it all began during a diving vacation. “I thought I'd see thousands of fish, but the seabed was devastated. Still, I continued until someone yelled at me to move aside because a boat was coming, and, to make matters worse, it had its volume turned up too high. Neither the sea nor the silence,” she recalls, disappointed. “Then I thought, maybe the real vacation is the one where you're at home reading.”

Are you against traveling? “No, of course not. But maybe I don't have to see everything. I just want to go to places where a friend is waiting for me.” And with that in mind, she began writing a total of seven stories whose structure, according to the writer, “could symbolize the flight of an airplane. The first ones are about takeoff, the middle ones go through a turbulent zone, and the final ones allow for a calm landing.” Of course, they all share a common theme: friendship and love, as well as an underlying question: How do we build the bridge that unites the islands that we are every day?

“Cruises and all-inclusive hotels terrify me.”

The protagonists dedicate themselves to inventing the boundaries of their relationships and celebrating them, although, as Adaui points out, "they also betray them, anticipate them, and confront them. In one way or another, they are always in transit, as they desire to travel toward something new, and they do so with wonder. One could say that any resemblance to reality is a mere coincidence, but the truth is, it isn't. The inspiration came after several autobiographical episodes of listening. My listening hunts are very common. Arguing couples, children with their unpredictable comments... any commentary is likely to end up in my pages."

Well, "that's another of the original premises," he admits. "The rest is spontaneous and emerges before me as the story unfolds. Not even I know the ending. Dialogue is the most important thing, and I completely distrust books that barely have any, since it's what allows us to explore personality and carries the weight of the plot."