The Mexican David Toscana wins the Alfaguara novel prize 2026 | Culture | EUROtoday

The author David Toscana (Mexico, 64 years outdated) received the Alfaguara 2026 novel prize this Tuesday with the work The blind military which can hit bookstores subsequent March. Distinguished with the Xavier Urrutia and Elena Poniatiwska awards, in addition to the Vargas Llosa Biennial award, for earlier works, he now provides a brand new award – “the one we all want,” he acknowledged – with a brand new work of fiction, described within the ruling as “a great epic of the defeated.” According to the award doc, Toscana strikes away from “the conventional historical narrative to offer a symbolic, almost mythical reading about war, power and resistance.”

The jury on this XXIX version has been chaired by Jorge Volpi, Mexican author, winner of this identical award in 2018 and present director of the Conde Duque Contemporary Culture Center in Madrid, and has been made up of the writers Brenda Navarro and Agustina Bazterrica, in addition to the scout and cultural programmer Camila Enrich —who launched the Finistres undertaking in Catalonia— and the journalist who directs the RTVE program PageOscar Lopez. Pilar Reyes, editorial director of the literary division of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, was additionally a part of the jury with voice however no vote. “Based on a historical event from the 11th century in which Basil II, emperor of Byzantium, orders the blinding of 15,000 Bulgarian soldiers, the author creates a dark and powerful fable,” states the minutes, which additionally spotlight the “dark humor” and “oral tone” of the work.

The creator, skilled as an engineer in his native Monterrey, has been based mostly in Madrid for just a few years. Toscana went as much as the stage the place the jury was ready for him, and spoke in regards to the house exterior of time that’s constructed in literature. “I didn’t think much about our time, because novels think for themselves. The book talks about an event that occurred 1,012 years ago, which necessarily also talks about our time, just as novels from a thousand years ago also talk to us about today,” he mentioned earlier than including that he understands his guide as a tribute to literature.

A codex preserved within the National Library, the Skylitizens of Madrid, which was uncovered after its restoration in 2024, has performed a central function within the gestation of the novel, as he defined. “It is a great chronicle of war and it shows how values ​​change over time,” he famous, explaining that his novel begins with a paragraph taken from this Byzantine textual content on which seven illustrators labored.

His Polish spouse and his proximity to Poland, the place he spends lengthy durations of time, convey him nearer to the battle in Ukraine, one thing that he assumes has ended up being distilled in a roundabout way in his new work. “I really like war literature, stories that push human beings to the limit,” he mentioned earlier than including that the resistance of people is a subject that particularly captivates him and the Balkans is a spot for which he feels a particular love. The story of these blind those who he collects in his novel has by no means been developed, though it’s a tragedy remembered with monuments. Toscana recomposes it from a number of first individuals in a story that gives a “symbolic, almost mythical reading of the war,” in response to the jury. “I try to fight so that prose can usurp the place of poetry, without being it,” Toscana warned.

The celebration and announcement of the award, within the glass gallery of the Cibeles Palace in Madrid, introduced collectively totally different actors from the literary and publishing world this Tuesday. Nuria Cabutí, CEO of the Penguin Random House Editorial Group, opened the session to vindicate the function of books in an “age marked by speed” and the necessary function that literature performs in “training in empathy and critical thinking.” The author and Councilor for Culture of the Madrid City Council, Marta Rivera de la Cruz, highlighted the town’s dedication to tradition as a strategic axis, earlier than giving the ground to the Secretary of State for Culture, Jordi Marti Grau.

Authors who had received awards in earlier editions comparable to Santiago Roncagliolo, Manuel Vicent, Sergio Ramírez, Patricio Pron and the educational Clara Sánchez attended the massive occasion. The Cervantes Prize winner and educational Luis Mateo Díaz, alongside along with his colleagues within the plenary classes of the RAE Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón and José María Merino, the director of the Cervantes Institute and poet, Luis García Montero, the author and visitor editor of the Yeguas de Troya label, Gabriela Wiener. Writers comparable to Rosa Montero, Aroa Moreno, Marcos Giralt Torrente and Luisgé Martín and booksellers comparable to Lola Larumbe and Jesús Trueba additionally attended.

Endowed with $175,000, a sculpture by Martín Chirino and publication all through the Spanish-speaking territory by the Alfaguara label, the award is among the hottest within the Spanish language. On this event, 1,140 manuscripts have been obtained, of which just about half have been despatched from Spain (524), and greater than 100 from Argentina, Mexico and Colombia respectively.

The Alfaguara award, nearly in its thirtieth version, was created within the mid-sixties when Alfaguara was born, interrupted shortly after and resumed on the finish of the nineties with its present format and transatlantic spirit. Among the winners lately it’s price mentioning Pilar Quintana, Sergio del Molino, Ray Loriga, or Juan Gabriel Vásquez.