Last Friday, November 4, the Ondarense auditorium hosted the presentation of the latest novel by the local writer Jovi Lozano-Seser, awarded the Enric Value Prize for a novel in Valencian 2021, awarded by the Alicante Provincial Council.
The event was attended by a large audience that filled the venue to the brim and was led by the author, the editor and manager of the Bromera Group, Josep Gregori, and by the local artist Toni Ortolà, responsible for the book's cover, who valued in his intervention «the pride of putting a face to a work that will be distributed throughout the linguistic field».
It is worth mentioning that the cover of the award-winning novel is one of the works that made up the painter's exhibition The power of looks, which was first exposed during the time of the pandemic. And it is that the novel, although it is inspired by the times of COVID-19, is not only a work about the pandemic, as the editor Josep Gregori commented when assessing the importance of the Ondarense writer's work "in response positive and vitalist at the stumbling block of a few years that unfortunately we have all had to overcome collectively ».
The act also had the collaboration of the Escola de Teatre de Ondara. Rosa Serra and Vale Mengual, members of the group, performed a dramatized reading of a fragment of the work directed by Rosa Catalan, head of the school.
On the part of the author, the most remarkable of the novel and at the same time connection with the legacy of Enric Valor, has been the opportunity to literaturize the town of Ondara and thus dignify the population as a literary setting.
After maig, abans de l'estiu, is the chronicle of the second life that Àngels Pons begins, a nurse who returns to her hometown after losing her husband during the pandemic, leaving behind more than forty years of life in Valencia. Not in vain, the novel reproduces local streets and businesses and even has real undulating characters, to whom the author has given a role in fiction.
“For me it was a complex but necessary exercise to dignify life in the villages at a time as delicate as the pandemic. That is why it is a luminous novel inspired by life, and not death: I wanted the virus episode to be a stimulus to portray what is worthwhile in life, and not precisely the opposite.
It is worth mentioning that the Enric Valor Award from the Alicante Provincial Council will soon be awarded to Jovi Lozano-Seser in Castalla, municipality of Enric Valor, and that the novel has been published by the Bromera publishing house.
