The work is based on real events. It was March 2014 when a local newspaper in Hemphill, Texas, published an announcement from a woman congratulating her husband and his lover on the child they were expecting. Far from going unnoticed among the pages of the newspaper, that tiny announcement immediately captured the attention of readers and ended up becoming a viral news story worldwide.
The novel begins exactly like this: when journalist Ginebra Vern is commissioned to write an article about that unusual announcement. It was supposed to be a brief piece without much transcendence, conceived almost more as a clickbait article than as a profound writing. However, the article not only goes viral, but also becomes an unexpected trigger that will force the protagonist to rethink the way she looks at the world, her profession, and even her own life.
As the article spreads, the protagonist begins to question what it means to turn the intimate lives of three unknown people into mass consumption material. Where is the line between informing and exposing? What is the price of telling such an intimate story just to get views? This moral dilemma prompts the journalist to travel to the small Texas town to meet the real protagonists of the story she herself has helped to spread.
Thus, Agnès Marquès uses fiction to reflect on journalism —a profession she knows firsthand, having worked before the microphones and cameras of Catalunya Ràdio, TV3 or RAC1— and "the insurmountable distance between reality and truth, between facts and narrative." The novel thus delves into the gray areas of journalism: into the responsibility of professionals who narrate other people's lives and into the often invisible consequences of exposing those intimacies of third parties.
With La segona vida de Ginebra Vern, Marquès also vindicates the right of the female protagonists to opacity, to contradiction and to not having to constantly justify their decisions. In short, to the "right to be contradictory and questionable, and to walk on the line of morality and immorality, making decisions that do not always have to be justified."
With this second novel, after Ningú sap que soc aquí (2022), Agnès Marquès (Barcelona, 1979) has won the Premi Ramon Llull, an award granted for the first time in 1981 with the aim of stimulating literary creation in Catalan and promoting its dissemination. The prize is endowed with 60,000 euros and the work will be edited and published on February 25 in Catalan (Columna), Spanish (Destino) and Portuguese.
In the 46th edition of the award, 64 original and unpublished works were submitted, which were evaluated by a jury composed of Carles Casajuana, Pere Gimferrer, Isona Passola, Estel Solé —the winner of the previous edition with Aquest tros de vida—, Gerard Quintana, Carme Riera and Emili Rosales.