Spanish poet and novelist Manuel Vilas received on Friday in Barcelona the 79th Nadal Prize for the novel “Us”which she presented under the pseudonym Emily Watson and which recounts the mourning and journey of introspection and reconstruction of a woman after the death of the great love of her life.
The award, which had a jury made up of the writers Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Care Santos, Lorenzo Silva, Andrés Trapiello and Emili Rosales and to which 997 authors submitted, consists of €30,000 and, moreover, in the launch of the novel on February 1 with the Destino labelthe publisher that awards the traditional Nadal prize every January 6 since 1944.
El Nadal, promoted by Ediciones Destino of the Planeta group, It is the oldest award given in Spain: started in 1944 and recognizes unpublished works written in Spanish. Traditionally it is delivered on Three Kings Day.
?️ We recover the words of thanks from Manuel Vilas (@granvilas), brand new winner of the #PremioNadal 2023 with the novel “We”.
February 1 in bookstores! @EdDestino pic.twitter.com/PqTXDZApNB
– Planetadelibros.com (@Planetadelibros) January 7, 2023
“Us“, a title inspired by the bolero by Los Panchos composed by Pedro Junco, tells the story of a 50-year-old woman named Irene, protagonist of the “happiest marriage in the world”, until her happiness ends when Marcelo, her husband, dies. rebuild her life, the Irene will embark on a restorative journey through the Mediterranean.
“Once I was listening to the bolero, I thought who could be the protagonists of these extraordinarily melancholic love stories,” Vilas told about the origin of the title when he received the prize for a book in which the protagonists share the role of the subject. , the duel.
In Vilas’s work there are also antecedents and traces of different duels. “Ordesa”the book that established them as storytellers and which won the Women’s Award in France, spoke of a personal loss, although this time it was about healing the wounds of a tormented filiation.
“Joy”Vilas’s novel that was a finalist for the Premio Planeta in 2019, is about a healing journey for a character in a state of shock.
In 2021, during a interview with Telam After the publication of “Los besos”, he assimilated the role of literature with the most vital of existence and he confessed that it was writing that allowed him to face the pandemic: “I wanted to write a love story, but of course the pandemic came and everything turned upside down. In order for me to believe the story I wanted to tell, I had to put the pandemic inside; for me literature, as I conceive it, is a representation of life, of what is happening to us. It was evident that the pandemic had to come out. And I am a very vital person, the pandemic affected me a lot: on the one hand, the people who died, and on the other, the life that we were told we had to live, a life of closure. I almost took refuge in this love story to be able to fight the pandemic. Create loving music.” .
The race de Vilas (Barbastro, 1962) began with his role as a poet rather than as a narrator. He published his first book of verses in 1990 but it was in the following decade that he built his record, between acoustic and humorous. That year, the Lumen publishing house published “A single life”, a selection of poems chosen by the author.
He came to storytelling from nonfiction. She wrote travel books, short essays on cultural criticism, diaries, journalistic books.
Along with the ruling on the Nadal Award, Destino announced the 55th Josep Pla Award for novels written in Catalan and this time awarded to the journalist Gemma Ventura Farré for “La llei de l’hivern”. The story also has to do with mourning and intimacy: a young woman watches over her grandfather in a town while she is dying.
In 2022, Nadal went to the Spanish journalist Ines Martin Rodrigo with “Las formas del querer”, a novel that vindicates the therapeutic and repairing power of literature. In 2019, this same award went to the Argentine Guillermo Martínez with the novel “The Crimes of Alicia”, a work where the future publication of the intimate diaries of the writer Lewis Carroll generates a series of murders and mysteries.
