Alba Santiago She has no connection with the world of literature at a training or professional level, but she confesses that she has loved books “from a very young age” thanks to the influence of her parents. “They instilled in me to read, to always have that imagination awake.”he states to explain his immersion in writing, which he considers “as something almost therapeutic” and that in addition “it could also make other people feel good”, which is why he was encouraged to write.
Just published Flor Maria and her alpaca farm, a work intended for Children public which was presented yesterday in A Coruña and which sets out the need for conserve the environment and help the elderlybecause she considers it “very necessary for children to have a reference point in terms of values” and that adults do not have “much time to explain certain things to the little ones, who have to learn them by leaps and bounds”. For this reason she defends “literature with values so that they can learn the real world always from a point of view that is appropriate for their age and a little softer”.
He confesses that getting into children’s literature, in which readers are characterized by high demands, gave him “a certain respect.” “I had a lot of ideas in my mind, but I didn’t really know how to link them to what a child is. “So I took several courses to be able to reach them through literature and a teacher told me that you could talk to children about absolutely everything, but gently when explaining things, and that stuck with me,” points out about his literary learning. To reach the children’s audience, he tried to bring out from within him the spirit of that life stage, which he says “is always there in our hearts, because we never stop believing in things that perhaps as adults we shouldn’t.”
In a society in which screens are present in people’s lives from birth, Alba Santiago admits that capturing children’s attention with a book “is difficult, but not impossible,” to which she adds that “parents “They try to get children back into the habit of reading because it gives them much more than screens.” “I am quite convinced from the time I have been in this world that parents always want their children to return to good habits. And reading, without a doubt, is one of the best we can acquire,” she declares.
Back to the origins
Life on an alpaca farm in Peru may seem like a very exotic topic for a children’s book, which the author came to after watching a documentary about these animals. “The idea of doing something that combined sustainability with helping the elderly had been in my head for a long time,” he says about the plot of the work, and details that he opted for alpacas because the wool they produce means “going back to the origins.” ” and because the population that raises them “is aging but does not want to get rid of its animals, it needs strong arms and, in this case, Flor María needed someone to help her with her farm.”
The other protagonist of the book appears to “show the world that fashion can be sustainable and ethical too.” But she clarifies that she does not intend to “teach anyone, you don’t feel like they are trying to give you a lesson on how to behave, it is a story of two women who need each other and help each other.”
