I LETRAVERSAL POETRY PRIZE

Food is one of the most everyday rituals and, at the same time, one of the most loaded with meaning. We repeat it almost without thinking: the table set, the dishes, the occupied chairs. Presences we take for granted until something begins to change.

Amor y pan is set precisely in that moment before absence, when silence falls over the tablecloths and disrupts the calm of the familiar. Like a sign that anticipates the fire before the flames appear, the book delves into that instant when the everyday begins to crack.

Far from constructing a generational portrait, the poetry collection explores an intimate experience: that of a subjectivity moving between places, affections, and desires for belonging. Growing up in one place while longing for another, inhabiting a constant feeling of displacement.

Nostalgia appears here as a form of hunger. The desire to bring together places, times, and people who can no longer coincide in the same space. Faced with that impossibility, writing becomes a gesture of affection: a way to bridge distances and to try to gather, even if only for a moment, what life separates.

With this book, Paula Melchor won the I LETRAVERSAL Poetry Prize, consolidating a poetic voice that reflects on memory, desire, and the absences that cross everyday life.