Читать книгу Let them all tell you what happened - Mercedes Pescador - Страница 5

Writings from the heart

I started this collective literary work on March 12th 2020, I was full of curiosity but I also did it out of my own fears. The World Health Organization (WHO) had just declared the coronavirus or COVID-19 a pandemic, the death toll was alerting of an unknown danger with unpredictable consequences which was spreading from country to country, causing death and misery. The book shops were closing, the crisis was affecting every economic sector and the continuity of my own publishing label was unknown.

If this were to be my last book, I would be grateful.

While scientists were desperately searching for a vaccine to save humanity, I found refuge in these intimate chronicles of the 2020 pandemic.

While world leaders were declaring the state of emergency and ordering their citizens to stay home to fight the unknown and highly contagious virus, I knew that my passion for the written word would be my only confinement. The lockdown, the closing of borders, airports, schools and companies was pointing to a recession and in my heart, there was a growing need to tell the story, to leave a testimony for humanity.

These pages have been written by authors from across the five continents during the convulsive spring of 2020 and they make up an emotional radiography of what they were thinking and feeling while facing a threat to their own lives. All of them appear with their real names, without any position or titles. There are town mayors, ambassadors, diplomats, artists, writers, teachers, housekeepers, unemployed, pensioners, nurses, of all ages and backgrounds, they all put together their words to write about love, fear, family, context, fortune and future. Some express themselves with a poem, others choose an illustration or a photograph. All of them together make up the evidence of how a pandemic, 2020’s, changed our lives.

Thank you to all of you, writers, men and women from the five continents, thank you for granting me the rights to publish and put it out at everyone’s disposal. Your words have been my stimulus. Thank you, dear Alicia Kaufmann, for sending out invitations all around the world so the most intimate diaries could reach our publishing house. Thank you, Carolina Orihuela, Estephanía Guerrero, Any Do Santos and Alicia Ojalvo for your priceless collaboration with the production and launching of this literary work.

The impressive cover illustration is by the world-renowned Chilean painter and illustrator Carmen Aldunate. The back-cover drawing is by Adam, who, at just 5-year-old and confined with his parents in the U.S., keeps drawing his life and he recreates the world as a big house with one sole roof through where the “bad bug” sneaks in.

If this were to be my last book, I would be grateful. Thank you.

Mercedes Pescador