In A Safe Place—a work that won the 2018 Emmanuel Carballo Prize—Olivia Teroba moves with ease between everyday narration, chronicle and personal essay, resulting in a book as unique as it is intimate, which through careful and precise writing she shares with readers their thoughts and life experience. Set in both her arrival in Mexico City and her native Tlaxcala, she shares her influences, literary obsessions, and the difficulties of all kinds that come with the vocation of writing.

Based on topics as diverse as the chronicle of her grandfather being proud of being Tlaxcaltecan, the pressures to follow an aesthetic ideal experienced as a teenager, her mother's relationship with an abusive man who systematically strips her of her heritage, and a meticulous journey through the work of Elena Garro, among many others, Teroba gives voice to a sensitive gaze, which would seem to make full sense when captured as a written word, since, as he tells us in one of the essays in the book: «Search within the everyday neuroses, of the series of insignificant acts that translate as inactivity. What could there be in this void, in this nothingness? Does literature begin there? Writing as a way to get away from heaviness. To suddenly break the foolish equality of days. To reconnect."