Las niñas del naranjel is the new novel by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Best Translated Book, the 2024 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award, and the 2024 Fundación Medifé Filba Award, as well as recognized by the 2023 Ciutat de Barcelona Award and selected among the best books of the year by Babelia.
Based on the historical figure of Catalina de Erauso, the legendary Lieutenant Nun who was born in Spain as a girl in 1592 and joined the conquest of America disguised as a man, the author builds a fiction overflowing with imagination, critique, and desire. Antonio, who has escaped the gallows thanks to the Virgin of the Orange Tree, flees with two starving girls and begins, deep in the jungle, a long letter to his aunt, the prioress. Along the way, he recalls his past lives as a muleteer, shopkeeper, soldier, cabin boy, and page, while now trying to care for Michi and Mitãkuña, who interrupt him with difficult and illuminating 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 genders. Cabezón Cámara moves against the norm and creates a new loving grammar where Miyazaki’s cinema, Latin prayers, songs in Basque, and words in Guaraní coexist, unsettling the meter of the Golden Age.
With lyrical, irreverent, and deeply political prose, Las niñas del naranjel confirms Gabriela Cabezón Cámara as one of the most unique voices in contemporary Spanish literature, at the crossroads of historical novel, queer writing, and an Indies chronicle imagined from the future.
Awards and Recognitions
2025 National Book Award for Best Translated Book
2024 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award
2024 Fundación Medifé Filba Award
2023 Ciutat de Barcelona Award
“Cabezón Cámara’s captivating poetics show us how experimenting with history can be both magical and harsh.”
The New York Times
