The girls of the orange grove This is the new novel by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Best Translated Work, the 2024 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, and the 2024 Medifé Filba Foundation Prize, as well as being recognized with the 2023 Ciutat de Barcelona Prize and selected among the best books of the year by Babelia.

Drawing on the historical figure of Catalina de Erauso, the legendary Lieutenant Nun who was born a girl in Spain in 1592 and joined the conquest of America disguised as a man, the author constructs a fiction overflowing with imagination, critique, and desire. Antonio, who has escaped the gallows thanks to the Virgin of the Orange Grove, flees with two starving girls and begins, deep in the jungle, a long letter to his aunt, the prioress. During this journey, he recalls his previous lives as a muleteer, shopkeeper, soldier, cabin boy, and page, while now trying to care for Michi and Mitãkuña, who interrupt him with challenging and insightful questions.

The novel narrates the violence of colonization and the devastation of territories and bodies, but it also proposes another way of thinking about relationships, affection, and gender. Cabezón Cámara challenges the norm and creates a new grammar of love where the films of Miyazaki, Latin prayers, Basque songs, and Guarani words coexist, disrupting the metrics of the Golden Age.

With lyrical, irreverent, and deeply political prose, The girls of the orange grove It confirms Gabriela Cabezón Cámara as one of the most unique voices in contemporary Spanish literature, at the crossroads of historical novel, queer writing and chronicle of the Indies imagined from the future.

Awards and recognitions

National Book Award for Best Translated Work 2025

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize 2024

Medifé Filba Foundation Award 2024

City of Barcelona Award 2023

"Cabezón Cámara's captivating poetics show us how experimenting with history can be both magical and harsh."

The New York Times