The Sirin by Laura Blanco Villalba

Strengths
• Style. The narrative style is a tribute to Jane Austen and guides us at a slow pace through the story, in which rumours, suspicions and clues are dropped in dribs and drabs until the final revelations.
• Historical and literary documentation. The story is set in 1817 and there are numerous references to the Gothic and Romantic genres.
• Worldbuilding. The construction of the vampire world is interesting and complex, and the reader is drawn into it gradually.

About Laura Blanco Villalba
Born in Madrid in 1983, Laura Blanco studied Journalism at the Complutense University. During her time at university, she wrote numerous articles for the Centro de Colaboraciones Solidarias, an agency that writes articles on social and committed topics. Between 2003 and 2005, she participated in the literary workshop of the writer Jorge Eduardo Benavides, thanks to whom she had the opportunity to present some of her stories in live literary readings in Madrid.

In 2005, he created the first city blog about Madrid, “De Madrid al cielo…” where he published some literary and informative writings about anecdotes, traditions and corners of the Spanish capital.

After working for the newspaper El Mundo and the EFE Agency, she pivoted in 2007 towards the Internet sector and the world of web consulting, where she became interested in digital content and social networks. She currently works at Tíndalos Diseño Intuitivo, a company of which she is co-founder, as a community manager and collaborates as a columnist on numerous blogs on different topics.

She has published some micro-stories in anthologies such as Historias del Dragón (2013, Kelonia Editorial), Cachitos de amor V (2016, ACEN Editorial), Para Olympia (2017, ACEN Editorial). She has won the XXIV Edition of Literary Microjustas (2019) and the XX Edition of La Sortija (2018). In 2022, two of her stories have been published in the anthologies of the IX Short Story Contest of Cornellà de Llobregat and the VI Edition of Micro-stories of the Bezmiliana Cultural Circle.

In 2020, she published Miríadas, an anthology of her best micro-stories, and La canción más larga del mundo, a Christmas story for all ages that features the Extraordinary Christmas Lottery. La Sirin is her first novel.