Alberto Díaz Tornero

I was born on a Saturday in Madrid, deep into the winter of 1988. Creativity has run through me since adolescence — back then I was already writing songs to hum along the school corridors. It wasn't until 2012 that one of them saw the light, published on Mecánica Celeste, the debut record by the group Versilia. During those university years, alongside a friend and her guitar, I shed my self-consciousness and performed at small bars in the city centre.

I entered short story and flash fiction competitions and occasionally came away with a prize — among them the sixth edition of the San Javier microfiction contest against gender violence, with my piece Un Tercer Piso Sin Ascensor.

More recently, I decided to take an advanced poetry workshop at the Fuentetaja school, and from everything I learned there — and everything I have lived — «Mentimérame», my first collection of poems, was born.

I always thought writing was my way of expressing myself, of being able to say everything I think, everything I am. Now I know it is more than that. It is my way of feeling, my way of making sense of this untameable life.