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The 2023 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Memoir or Autobiography

Finalist: The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir, by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Doubleday)

A lyrical personal account that reclaims a family legacy of indigenous practices, beliefs, and narratives to challenge Western notions of history and memory.

Nominated Work

The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir

By

Ingrid Rojas Contreras

 

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • From the bestselling author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family’s otherworldly legacy.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, VULTURE, PEOPLE, BOSTON GLOBE, VANITY FAIR, ESQUIRE, & MORE

“Rojas Contreras reacquaints herself with her family’s past, weaving their stories with personal narrative, unraveling legacies of violence, machismo and colonialism… In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”—New York Times Book Review 

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and ’90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”: the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit “the secrets,” Rojas Contreras’ mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water.

This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to “the secrets.”

In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono’s remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often amusing guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe “the secrets” are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse.

Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.

Biography

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.

Winners

Prize Winner in Memoir or Autobiography in 2023:

Hua Hsu

An elegant and poignant coming of age account that considers intense, youthful friendships but also random violence that can suddenly and permanently alter the presumed logic of our personal narratives. Memoir or Autobiography

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Memoir or Autobiography in 2023:

Chloé Cooper Jones

A spellbinding and brutally honest memoir drawing on art, travel, cultural observation and philosophical scholarship to convey the full experience of life as a disabled person whose view of humanity becomes increasingly compassionate.

The Jury

Amy Wilentz(Chair)

Professor of English & Literary Journalism, University of California, Irvine

Cinelle Barnes

Essayist, Memoirist & Editor, Charleston, S.C.

Grace M. Cho

Professor of Sociology, College of Staten Island

Danzy Senna

Associate Professor of English, University of Southern California

Ben Yagoda

Professor of English & Journalism, Emeritus, University of Delaware

2023 Prize Winners

Commentary

Kyle Whitmire of AL.com, Birmingham

For measured and persuasive columns that document how Alabama's Confederate heritage still colors the present with racism and exclusion, told through tours of its first capital, its mansions and monuments–and through the history that has been omitted.
Investigative Reporting

Staff of The Wall Street Journal

For sharp accountability reporting on financial conflicts of interest among officials at 50 federal agencies, revealing those who bought and sold stocks they regulated and other ethical violations by individuals charged with safeguarding the public’s interest.
See All 2023 Winners