Edurne Portela is one of Spain’s most talented young writers, and her popularity and recognition have grown incessantly over the last few years. Until 2015, she was a professor of Literature at the University of Lehigh (Pennsylvania), but she decided to forsake her university career in the US and return to Spain to make her living as a writer in a small town in the Sierra de Gredos with a population of ten. Galaxia Gutenberg published her essay The Echo of the Shots: Culture and Memory of Violence (2016), as well as three novels: Better To be Absent (2017); Ways of Being Away (2019); and The Eyes Closed (2021, Euskadi Award to the best novel in Spanish). In 2023, she published her novel Maddi and the Borders, hailed by critics as one of the must-read fiction books of the year. She collaborates with the main Madrid newspapers and with Radio Nacional de España.