Raúl Quinto wins the National Narrative Prize for his chronicle of the Great Raid that needed to exterminate the Spanish gypsies | EUROtoday

The Cartagena novelist Raul Quinto He has obtained the 2024 National Narrative Prize awarded by the Ministry of Culture because of his novel Shadow King’s Hammeredited by Jekyll & Jill. The ruling has highlighted the writer’s work “for being a brilliant proposal that, situated on the border between genres, creates an original fictional essay of historical interpretation. With a style rich in nuances, lavish in metaphors and magnificent descriptions, Raúl Quinto presents a “a vigorous portrait of the interval during which he precisely dissects the practices, conflicts and rites of the State of the Old Regime and the tried extermination of a minority such because the gypsy folks.”

Shadow King’s Hammer It is, according to the ruling, “a spherical novel, of nice stylistic effort and engaging video games of views that sheds gentle on a silenced and fairly unknown a part of the historical past of Spain.” In its pages, Quintus, narrates the story of the Great Roundup, a failed project to exterminate the gypsy peopleofficially known as General Gypsy Prisonwhich began on July 30, 1749, under the reign of Ferdinand VI. The authorities snatched their victims from their homes in nightly raids and for 18 years – until they were finally granted pardon – They turned all “males over seven years of age” into forced labor, with an order of general imprisonment, and separated them from their wives and youngest children.who were taken to houses of mercy so that they could not reproduce again. Many of those families never saw each other again. The first night 2,000 people were arrested, and on subsequent days another 7,000.

Raúl Quinto (1978) has a degree in Art History from the University of Granada and lives in Almería where he works as a teacher. He has written books of poems such as The skin of the watchman (DVD, 2005), The flower of torture (Renaissance, 2008), white noise (The Beautiful Warsaw, 2012), The broken tongue (La Bella Varsovia, 2019) or the notebook Sola (The Beautiful Warsaw, 2020). He has also published hybrid narrative books such as Idioteca, Yosotros (Trojan Horse, 2015) and Son (La Bella Warsaw, 2017). NOF4’s songhis previous novel, also published by Jekyll & Jill, told the true story of a disturbed man isolated from the world. Quinto is also one of the coordinators of the José Ángel Valente Faculty of Poetry and has collaborated as a critic in publications such as Quimera magazine.

The prize, which is endowed with 30.000 eurosrecognized Pilar Adón in its last edition, and has in its recent honors Marilar Aleixandre, Xesús Fraga, Juan Bonilla, Cristina Morales, Almudena Grandes, Fernando Aramburu and Cristina Fernández Cubas, among others.