Leyre Arrue Usoz Wins 20th Annual Santa Cruz Women’s Short Story Contest
Leyre Arrue Usoz won the 20th annual Women’s Short Story Contest in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which also celebrated its milestone anniversary with the release of an anthology featuring two decades of winning works.
The 20th annual Women’s Short Story Contest, hosted by the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council, has officially concluded. The awards ceremony highlighted the local government's ongoing support for female writers, with the top prize going to Leyre Arrue Usoz from Guipúzcoa for her story, Granito rosa.
Over the past two decades, the contest has become a significant literary platform. This year, organizers received 263 entries from across Spain, Europe, and the Americas. The runner-up prize was awarded to Santa Úrsula resident Rosa Gladys Ruiz de Azúa for Sangre de mujer, while Yasmina Romero Morales received the local author award for El mercado del trauma. The jury also selected seven additional stories—by Manuela Gómez García, María Isabel Jurado Hernández, Ester Llorente Peñalva, Lorena María Padilla Sánchez, María José Fernández Valle, and Silvia Lozano Calatayud—to be featured in the contest’s official publication.
The awards ceremony took place this Wednesday and was attended by Mayor José Manuel Bermúdez, Councilor for Equality and Affective-Sexual Diversity Gladis León, and representatives from the Canary Islands government and the Municipal Council of Women. Beyond the cash prizes—2,000 euros for the winner, 1,000 for the runner-up, and 600 for the local category—the contest serves as a vital way to promote women’s voices in literature.
To mark the contest’s 20th anniversary, the Equality and Affective-Sexual Diversity Service released Historias que trascienden, an anthology featuring 22 winning stories from the competition’s history. This collection highlights the evolution of themes and styles in women’s writing over the last two decades. The City Council confirmed that the winning entries from this year will also be published in a new volume, continuing the tradition of documenting these works.