Lucía Etxebarría de Asteinza is a Spanish writer. She was born in Valencia in 1966, of Basque parents as her name suggests, the youngest of seven children. The Basque surname Etxebarria has no diacritics, although its Spanish version Echevarría has. Etxebarría was a typo that she liked and adopted as a nom de plume, though it is not used in all her books.
Contents |
Her first book was Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love’s biography: La historia de Kurt y Courtney: aguanta esto (1996). Her first novel, Amor, curiosidad, prozac y dudas (1997) received Ana María Matute's support, and situated her in the Generacion Kronen scope. The following year her second novel, Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes, won the Nadal prize.
With De todo lo visible y lo invisible (2001) she won the Primavera Prize. With Un milagro en equilibrio, she obtained the 53rd Planeta Prize in 2004. In addition to these books and many other titles she has published poetry; her collection Actos de placer y amor won the Barcarola Poetry Prize in 2004. She has published two collections of feminist essays, and has also worked as a scriptwriter.
In 2011, Etxebarria said she would stop writing, claiming that digital piracy of her books had made writing not worth the effort.[1]
Lucía Etxebarria has been accused of plagiarism twice. In 2001, the Spanish magazine Interviú published an article stating Etxebarria had copied literal verses from Antonio Colina for her book Estación de infierno, and that her first novel, Amor, curiosidad, Prozac y dudas, included literal sentences copied from the book Prozac Nation, by the American writer Elizabeth Wurtzel. Etxebarria sued the magazine, which was acquitted in tribunal court. The judge's sentence explicitly mentioned that the information published by Interviú was true, and that Extebarria had indeed copied works by Antonio Colina.[2] The judgement was not later challenged in an appeal court.
In 2006, Spanish psychologist Jorge Castelló sued her for plagiarism. He states that Etxebarria used one of his articles in the first chapter of her book Ya no sufro por amor, mixing sentences from his article with sentences by herself, without proper quotation marks and in a way that it is impossible to know who wrote them.[3] Etxebarria lists Castelló's article in the book bibliography and a warning text was included in the 6th edition. Castelló considers this is not enough, and requests that Etxebarria uses proper quotation marks surrounding his sentences.
In April 2005, she affirmed in an interview that "murciélago" (Spanish word for 'bat') was the only Spanish word that contained all five vowels, which is incorrect. This caused some controversy and a few satirical articles in response.[4]
The following bibliography is probably incomplete. Also, note that English language editions of Etxebarria's work are not currently available, and the title translations provided below may well not correspond to titles eventually used in the English edition of these books.