GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2024/25
Ten questions with GBP Short Story Prize author Valentina Gindri
(1) HI VALENTINA, AND CONGRATULATIONS ON BEING LONGLISTED FOR THE GBP SHORT STORY PRIZE! CAN YOU PLEASE INTRODUCE YOUR STORY, ‘THE SOUND OF THE SHELL’, IN TWO OR THREE SENTENCES?
It's a story about the blurred frontiers between being family and being an employee that live-in maids navigate in Brazil; about the shattering of childhood innocence — whether through working and caring for another child or through confronting social inequalities and the mysteries of the body. It’s about guilt and agency.
(2) PLEASE TELL US A BIT MORE ABOUT THE INSPIRATION FOR ‘THE SOUND OF THE SHELL’ TOO – AND THE WRITING OF IT.
Well, I wouldn’t go as far as to call it autofiction but the story is inspired by my own life. As a child, I had a 13-year-old nanny from another town who lived with my family until she was 16. She also came from a German migrant region and could speak German. My memories of her are blurred, but some details made their way into the description of the nanny in the story: how she was strict about making me shower, the time she trimmed my nails wrong (which I don’t even know if I truly remember or if my mind made it up, since I was so little), and the elaborate hairstyles she used to do. I remember once sneaking a look at her diary and finding very teenage-girl stuff. She also owned a book called Things Every Girl Needs to Know. Looking back, it’s so clear she was in the awakening of her adolescence. But at the time, she was an adult to me.
This young girl went on to attend university, lived abroad in Canada for a while, and now has a stable, specialized job in another state in Brazil. I never saw her again after she returned to her parents’ hometown, but we are friends on social media. Another funny factual thing is that German — completely unexpectedly — ended up becoming an important part of my life. It wasn’t something I sought or planned, yet now I have an emotional bond with it. At some point, it struck me that the first time I ever heard a word in German was through this nanny. I felt there was something deeper to this coincidence. Unlike the character in the story, I’m very fond of German.
Later on, I had another nanny, a full-grown woman who didn't live with us. By then, I was older. Once, she joined my family on a summer holiday and it was the first time she had ever seen the sea. I remember her filling jars with seawater, sand, and seaweed. She spent years working different jobs, and a couple of years ago, she returned to work for my parents, as a cleaner. She has never seen the sea again. She is a very dear and important person to me. I also vaguely remember attending her baby shower when I was a child.
I combined the stories of these two people, who played a decisive role in my upbringing, to create Karina. But of course, the two main characters are entirely new, independent ‘people,’ only inspired by these women and my childhood. The other events in the story are fictional as well.
I also had a childhood friendship similar to the one with Renata, with those toxic traits.
When I was 14, during a sleepover with girlfriends after a Carnival party, I witnessed one of my friends having an epileptic seizure in the early morning. It was really scary.
Late 2018, I wrote the first seeds of what would become this story. After reading a short story by Lucia Berlin, which felt monumental despite portraying banal things and ordinary jobs, I realized how much richness I could also find in my own life. The episode of the sea jar came to mind, this nanny wanting take some of the sea with her. So I wrote a few paragraphs about these two nannies, just some memories, very simple and direct. And I liked it. I saw something worth telling in it.
One of the things that hit me in these paragraphs was the guilt for having gone to the beach almost every summer since I was a baby, for taking the sea for granted. While knowing so many people in Brazil live their lives without ever seeing it.
Months later, coming back from a weekend by the sea, this image of someone vomiting sea came to my mind. The sickness of being in the open sea, the movement of the tide, the salty water that dried your mouth. I didn't want it to be a mere metaphor, but I felt it resonated with this guilt of being privileged enough to travel, while someone close to me, that I have affection for, never had the chance again.
So I kept writing. As I invested time and thought in the characters, the plot emerged, gradually taking shape. Things started to connect in a way that made sense, falling into place. The story came to stand on its own — cut off, untied from my biography. The characters were taking inevitable actions. During the pandemic I crafted a first version of it, close to this final one, in Portuguese.
Life happened and I set it aside, focusing on other projects. Later, during my master’s in Ireland, I rewrote the story in English and presented a new draft in class. The feedback was crucial for me to refine some things and make certain decisions. In 2024, I finally wrote the final version. Editing has been very time-consuming since I’m writing in a foreign language.
This story grew in me over the years. I’m really happy it made the longlist because I really believe in it. I feel I was able to approach a certain truth: not because of the biographical inspiration, but because I feel it reveals truths about feelings, relationships, society, and the mystery of our bodies.
The latter is another aspect of it. The vomiting sea and the epileptic seizure also speak, to some degree, to a personal unrest. I’m familiar with the body having uncontrolled reactions, refusing to obey. I’m familiar with chronic conditions and the maddening frustration of seeing many doctors unable to help. From these unfortunate experiences, I do believe there is a degree to which the body responds physically to emotional burdens.
(3) IT WOULD BE TERRIFIC TO HEAR A BIT MORE ABOUT THE DYNAMICS BETWEEN THE TWO ‘MAIN’ CHARACTERS. OBSTENSIBLY, THIS IS A STORY ABOUT A YOUNG GIRL AND HER NANNY. BUT KARINA – THE ‘NANNY’ – IS ACTUALLY JUST A CHILD TOO (THIRTEEN?), WHICH THROWS EVERYTHING INTO VERY STRANGE TERRITORY. CAN YOU SAY MORE ABOUT THAT?
Yes. It’s a child taking care of another child. Karina is the young girls’ primary source of affection; she is the person with whom the girl shares true intimacy. The nanny has authority, yet she is delicate and caring. Initially, she makes the girl feel safe.
But as the story develops, the girl’s relationship with Karina becomes ambivalent. The girl is confronted with daunting situations: a complicated friendship that wears her out and the frightening incident at the beach. There’s also a significant distance from her parents, who should have been her main caregivers. Gradually, the girl realizes that Karina is really young herself, that something is off, and she becomes disturbed by the fact that Karina is a teenager. Karina shouldn’t be the authority and Karina is acting weird. The girl loses a certain naivety with which she used to see the world. Then, what happens, I think, is a case of misguided anger. She is angry with her jealous friend Renata, she is angry with her parents, she is angry with herself; and she channels all this anger toward Karina, breaking her jar of sea and blaming her for the injury.
Karina, on her side, is dealing with her own struggles. Living away from home, being responsible for another child, grappling with her religious beliefs, her first period, her body changing. What is only suggested in the text — through her escapes to the ice cream parlour and what appears to be a hickey on her chest — hints at her first experience with love and sexuality. Karina is in the blossoming of her adolescence.
In Brazil, not only upper-class families but also middle-class households typically have a housekeeper who cooks and cleans. What used to be common 20-30 years ago — but is now rare — are live-in maids. Their personal and social lives were practically annihilated. Many middle-class Brazilian homes still include a servant’s room, though these spaces are less often used as maids’ bedrooms, especially since labor laws of the early 2000s. Needless to say, many of these maids also had to take care of children. Young nannies were common and still exist today. Though I’ve never heard of any nanny dropping out of school to work, they did this part-time caregiving work that was often beyond what was appropriate for their age, and their own care growing up was neglected.
And families expect their devotion, expect them to give love and affection. They often claim the domestic worker is ‘part of the family’.
Every friend I have has a memory of the nanny who helped raise them. For some, they felt like a second mother. Boundaries aren’t clearly defined, and the maid is present in intimate moments. I’m interested in the tension simmering within this in-between space, in these relationships with a blurred nature: sister, mother, nanny, maid, daughter.
Sometimes, even unofficially adopted children ended up taking on an overloaded role in house chores. In Brazil, the expression ‘pegar para criar’, which literally means ‘take in to raise’, describes this unofficial adoption of a child. This normally occurred when a family with better means sought to provide a more secure future for a less privileged child. But it was never done in the paper and the adopted person occupied an in-between place. They were subject to love that was not unconditional. They were expected to give back, and their mistakes were not tolerated, let alone forgiven. These arrangements were more common in older generations.
(4) AND CLASS, TOO. THIS ISN’T JUST A HEAVILY UNEQUAL RELATIONSHIP – IT’S TAKING PLACE IN A HEAVILY UNEQUAL SOCIETY. … WAS IT YOUR INTENTION TO DRAW OUT THAT PARALLEL (WITH ALL OF ITS ATTENDANT HORRORS)?
Yes, it’s not just the conflicts between them. There is also a larger class conflict. It’s an extremely unequal society, and its social structure is still very different from that of Europe, for example. There are more divisions, social bubbles, and invisible lines separating people.
Being stuck in low-paying jobs ends up being really brutal for Karina. She doesn't manage to rise. It’s even more cruel because when a problem arises in the family she lives with, she is quickly dismissed. She sleeps in the same room as the family’s children, she is there for meals, celebrations, weekends, holidays, etc. But in the end, she is nothing more than an employee to them
These class divisions penetrate the fabric of relationships, shaping how feelings are allowed, or not, to develop.
The narrator is also uneasy living in a classed society. Although she is on the upper side, it takes its toll on her. She struggles to find meaning in her job, she suffers from the chronic malaise. I believe she feels guilty not only for what she directly did to the nanny as a child but also because of class — a constant guilt.
Even in linguistic terms, it is tricky; there are nuances of power. The official term in Portuguese for a housekeeper is empregada doméstica. When I was little, it was commonly used, but over the years, I’ve noticed that people feel the need for a euphemism. They now say funcionária, faxineira, cozinheira, moça que trabalha. In some cases, there’s a degree of possession — it’s never ‘the’ cleaner, it’s always ‘my’ cleaner. Maid rooms in older buildings are being repurposed or used only for storage, and in Portuguese, they are always referred to in the diminutive: quartinho. It’s subtle, but I see another violence in these aspects of language.
In the story, I wanted to highlight inequality in mobility. More than material possessions, the working class has little freedom to move. While the narrator can choose whether or not to pursue a PHD abroad, has a car and air travel at her fingertips, Karina can’t go to the seaside because the distance is beyond her reach. It ultimately means a completely different way of being in the world. We could say they experience distance, physics, speed, differently. They have distinct perceptions of space.
And while the narrator may be able to make amends for what she did to Karina, the class situation is not something one individual alone can solve.
(5) YOURS IS ONE OF SEVERAL STORIES IN THIS YEAR’S LONGLIST WHICH UNFOLDS OVER MANY YEARS (RATHER THAN BEING A BRIEF SNAPSHOT, OR SINGLE EVENT). HOW DIFFICULT WAS IT TO MANAGE THAT KIND OF PROLONGED TIMELINE?
It was my biggest insecurity with this story. I wanted the events from both timelines to feel equally important. I didn’t want parts of the story to seem like a preamble or mere flashback. I was unsure whether to start in the present or the past and uncertain which verb tense to use. I wanted my time transitions to feel natural and clear, without being overly explained. I didn't want the narrative to lose rhythm.
I wrote different drafts, each starting from a different point. I read them out loud. In the end, this was the version that sounded best to me. In this structure, the discomfort with the language serves as the triggering element of the story, which also made sense to me.
(6) OK! ON TO YOUR WRITING MORE GENERALLY. HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WRITING? DO YOU HAVE A DAILY ROUTINE? ARE YOU WORKING ON SOMETHING AT THE MOMENT?
Since I’m a reader, I also dream of being a writer. This impulse, this desire, is present in my earliest memories. But I only started writing in 2016. By the end of that year, I was studying journalism and business, but felt frustrated by how slowly I was advancing with my writing. So I dropped business and started a writing course. That’s when things moved to another level — I found the essential motivation and validation to write fiction.
I haven’t managed to establish a proper daily routine yet, but hopefully, one day. I love when writing can be the first thing I do in the morning (after breakfast, of course).
I’m currently working on a collection of short stories. They are trespassed by recurring themes and similar atmospheres, ultimately creating a sense of unity. Some of them also portray women living in homes they don’t belong to, often in the role of care. The narratives are instilled with uncanny elements, there is always something a little strange happening. I also have a novel in mind, but I want to finish the collection first.
(7) WHAT’S THE BEST WRITING TIP YOU’VE EVER RECEIVED, AND WHAT’S THE WORST?
A good one that comes to mind now is: ‘Write to express, not to impress’. I believe good writing is a really honest and humble investigation of feelings and situations, without jumping to conclusions. It’s about the specifics, not the general. If you do a good job showing things, your values and ideas will come across beautifully. But when we create sentences that try too hard to have an effect, an impact — to impress — language swirls too much and feels artificial. But when we allow ourselves to be sensitive, sincerely trying to capture a certain truth (which will never be fully reached, which is always an attempt), the writing gains power. It works, it becomes effective.
A bad one for me is ‘Write to yourself, not to others’. While we probably shouldn’t write with a specific audience in mind, writing literature implies having a voice, projecting this voice — it’s essentially an act of communication. And when a text lacks this energetic drive to communicate, I feel it loses its power.
Another one that doesn’t work for me is ‘Ask yourself why you want to tell this story’.” If I were to rationalize too much, I wouldn’t write a page. Some of my texts come from very strange roots, so to speak, odd images. And I choose to trust them rather than interrogate them too much.
(8) HABITS, TOO. WHAT’S A BAD WRITING HABIT YOU HAVE – AND GIVE US ONE THAT’S PROVED FAIRLY USEFUL, TOO.
I have the bad habit of trying to fit everything in. I struggle to let things go — to do what’s best for the piece, even if it means abandoning ideas, images, phrases, or even characters. I postpone editing. I depend too much on deadlines to get things done. I find it hard to silence other duties and errands when I sit down to write. So sometimes, I end up writing only when everything else feels settled (even though those things didn’t really need my attention at that moment).
A good habit I have is writing down things that inspire me on my phone immediately, so I always have an archive to turn to. Another is identifying and addressing the anxieties that arise when I sit down to write — sometimes just by writing them down in a separate document. I also have a good color scheme for editing: one color for things I might cut, another for things I want to rephrase, another for sections I want to explore further, etc.
(9) OTHER WRITERS. CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT SOME AUTHORS YOU ADMIRE, AS WELL AS SOME THAT YOU ARE INFLUENCED BY?
I believe the writers I most admire have all influenced me to some degree: Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, Lucia Berlin, Truman Capote, Chekhov, Sarah Hall, Claire Keegan, Moacyr Scliar, Annie Proulx, Milan Kundera.
(10) FINALLY, “THE HORROR OF THE BLANK PAGE.” DO YOU FEEL THAT HORROR? AND HOW WOULD YOU ADVISE OTHER WRITERS TO GET BEYOND IT?
I’m lucky that I rarely face a completely blank page. When I sit down to write, it’s never to create a story from scratch, I always sit down when there’s already something solid I want to expand: a sentence, an image, a thought. I’m very image-driven, and I keep a brainstorm document filled with raw material.
But of course, I then struggle to connect things and develop this initial material. When it’s really not working, it’s better not to force it. I let it rest for a bit. I go for a walk, I exercise to tire my body. I write from a different environment – a nice café, a corner of the house I had never considered before. I light a candle. I write a bit on paper instead of on my computer. These physical shifts seem to help a lot. I think they release the pressure and anxiety, allowing things to flow better.
VALENTINA GINDRI is a brazilian writer and journalist currently based in Brazil, where she is working on a collection of short stories and contributing as a freelance correspondent for Deutsche Welle Brasil. She holds an M.Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin, supported by the Haddad Fellowship. In undergrad, she studied Journalism at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, spending a semester abroad at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and also took Creative Writing at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul. Her work includes four short stories published in independent collections in Brazil and a poem featured in Icarus Magazine.