Writer Natalia Jimenez Cardoso was awarded Colombia’s “El Barco de Vapor” Prize for Children and Youth Literature in its thirteenth edition of the work “It’s not a country, it’s a world,” the Culture Ministry said Wednesday.
Members of the jury considered Jimenez’s novel a celebration of the power of words to understand what makes us human: love and pain.
This version of the award was presented thanks to the alliance between Grupo SM Colombia and the Ministry of Culture, and as on previous occasions, it seeks to encourage the creation of literature for children and youth that conveys human, social and cultural values that help build a worthy world.
The award is awarded not only in Colombia, but in other countries such as Spain, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
Jimenez’s book includes love, play, laughter, pain, loss, physical death, and conversation that takes place outside of life as an excuse to talk about the things that two brothers share, even though they are two very different children.
In addition to being a writer, Jiménez is a pharmacologist, doctoral student in biomedical sciences at the Universidad del Valle and an undergraduate and graduate pharmacology teacher at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Javeriana Cali.
Likewise, he is the writer of comics and picture books on rare and orphan diseases.
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