Dominican author Biencar Pilod Luciano has published her second novel, "Yo solo quería una beca" ("I Just Wanted a Scholarship"), a story that questions the dream of emigrating and examines identity, social mobility and the gap between reaching a goal and living with the life built to achieve it.
The novel opens with the line: "Irazú Akeyra was right: I would not return." From its first pages, the book explores the conflict of leaving in search of a different life and discovering that any return, even an imagined one, happens from a transformed identity.
The novel was published in Spain by Grupo Editorial Círculo Rojo and is available in more than 4,000 Spanish bookstores. It can also be bought in physical and digital format through Amazon, reaching readers in the Dominican Republic, the United States and other markets.
A story built around a scholarship
The novel follows a young Dominican woman who turns her academic performance into a path toward starting a new life. After emigrating, she discovers that reaching her goal does not resolve every question. From a distance, she begins to recognize the value of what she left behind, while confronting the sacrifices and contradictions of the reality she chose.
Pilod Luciano said the scholarship works as a metaphor for any goal a person places their full expectations on, whether a university degree, a career, a visa, a marriage, money or the chance to start over.
She said the scholarship could stand for any goal that a person once idealized, pursued and achieved, representing the moment that pushes someone to look back and reassess their choices with the clarity that time and experience bring. She added that it also teaches people to enjoy the journey instead of fixating on a destination that can turn out very different from what they expected.
The cover, created by Dominican illustrator Caro López Corominas, visually captures the novel's meaning: the word "beca" (scholarship) appears crossed out and replaced by hand with "vida" (life). The gesture turns the title into a statement and reveals the novel's central question: what remains of our dreams once they stop being promises and become reality.
A writing voice shaped by the diaspora
Pilod Luciano places her literary identity at the crossing point of the philosophy of the self, women's narrative and Latin American social realism. Her writing focuses on identity, human relationships and how experience reshapes the way people see themselves. Among her influences, she cites Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, known for her treatment of female identity and interpersonal relationships, and Dominican writer Dan-el Padilla Peralta, whose work addresses the contradictions and less visible sides of the so-called American dream.
She said publishing as a Dominican author from the diaspora is a privilege she takes on with great commitment, describing art as a platform for visibility, debate and constructive criticism, and saying that as an author with access to an international market, she feels she must make use of it.
That commitment also carries a family dimension. Pilod Luciano lives in the United States with her family and works to keep her children, raised in a multicultural household, close to their Dominican roots. In her fiction, the Dominican Republic remains a territory of origin, memory and emotional reference.
Six years after her debut novel
"Yo solo quería una beca" arrives six years after "Ipseidades", Pilod Luciano's first novel, which connected with readers and book clubs in several countries. The gap between the two books reflected a personal decision to ease the pressure that came with her debut and to recover the enjoyment of writing without treating publication as the only measure of the creative process.
She said that this time she had nothing to prove, since she had already done it before, and that she wanted to enjoy the process and take her time with every character, every scene, every word and every chapter.
As part of that approach, she handwrote the complete first draft of the novel, a practice that let her focus on a single story and stay closer to the language. Although the new book connects with the world of "Ipseidades", it can be read independently. For the author, the link between the two books does not depend on a chronological sequence but on the emotional processes of their characters.
She said her books are not defined by time in a chronological way but by processes, adding that they are written but not everything is said. She described her ideal reader as someone curious, willing to engage with women's stories told with honesty, and open to seeing the same situation from different perspectives.
"Yo solo quería una beca" is available in physical and digital format through Amazon and circulates in more than 4,000 bookstores across Spain. Its distribution in Latin America includes the platform Buscalibre.
