The Aura Estrada Prize will be awarded biannually to a female writer, 35 or under, living in Mexico or the United States, who writes creative prose (fiction or nonfiction) in Spanish.

The prize will include a stipend (how much depends on how much we are able to raise for the endowment, but we hope it will be approximately $10,000.) It also, so far, includes residencies at three writers‘ colonies, Ucross in Wyoming, Ledig House in New York, and Santa Maddalena in Tuscany, Italy. Residencies can last up to two months each.

Granta en Español will also publish an excerpt of the winner‘s writing.

The first Aura Estrada Prize winner will be awarded at the Oaxaca Book Fair in November, 2009.

In the words of Margo Glantz, president of the prize jury:

"The Aura Estrada prize will be awarded to young women writers who are at the beginning of their career. To honor her memory, the prize will be awarded to writers who share many of the qualities that distinguished Aura's own output. Though she did not have time to produce a great deal, the texts she did write evince a concern for language that is unusual in so young a writer. In her precision, clarity, sense of humor and, above all, her ability to confound expectations, her work immediately let readers know that this was an outstanding new voice, like that of a young singer. It was a voice that would one day have taken on real splendor, its own timber and specific register, thanks to her innate talent and unflagging drive -- the all-important ingredient -- as well as to a vulnerable audacity that would have taken her very far."