The path of literature “is capricious and random. It has a lot of fortune. It can reach many readers or fail to reach them and it does not necessarily have to do with the text, but with a series of magic that surrounds it. We all know that there are excellent texts that do not reach the hands of readers and, at the same time, there are other texts that have wings, fly and reach not only readers in Spain and Latin America but also other languages. That has always been the mystery of texts. No editor knows for sure. “What will happen to a text once it is published?”
This was answered on Tuesday by the Mexican writer David Toscana in Madrid, Spain, at the Alfaguara Novel Prize 2026 ceremony, whose jury unanimously opted for the novel “The Blind Army”, by the same author, who was among the attendees and was immediately able to join the conversation.
The work, the jury highlighted, “narrated in the first person, acquires a choral and poetic tone that mixes testimony, legend and black humor, a great epic for the defeated.”
This was imposed on a total of 1,140 manuscripts from different Spanish-speaking countries, mainly from Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and the United States. It is the year, after the pandemic, in which more texts have participated to win this highly prestigious award, also endowed with a whopping $175,000, a sculpture by Martín Chirino and, of course, the simultaneous publication in all Spanish-speaking countries, scheduled for next March 26.
It is the fifth novel by a Mexican pen to win this award. With this, our country is ranked third with the most awards after Spain and Argentina, but above nations such as Chile, Cuba, Peru and Colombia.
One of the “most fascinating” works
During the conversation with the winner, the writer Jorge Volpi, who chaired the edition’s jury, mentioned:
“Thirty years ago, while a small group of writers in Mexico City created the Crack Generation, in Monterrey another small group of writers, among whom was David Toscana, created a rival group called El Panteón. Since then, Toscana has created one of the most unique and fascinating works of the Spanish language. This novel, in particular, seems to me to be, referring to a remote event from the 11th century, in a remote corner of the Balkans, it reflects, however, many metaphors of our time. This emperor who blinds his Bulgarian enemies, most of them gouging out their eyes, some leaving them blind in one eye to guide those who could not see. That metaphor about blindness and light is deeply current in this era with other types of war conflicts.
Volpi added that another of the qualities of the work is the presentation of the particular stories of each of the blind people portrayed and that, he said, “they reflect what happens in our time with all those anonymous victims of authoritarian power.”
For his part, Toscana responded that for the construction of the novel he did not think about the intricacies of our time, however, he added, “novels think for themselves. Once one creates an allegory, a metaphor, a story, some characters, and in some way it is based on the classical roots of literature, it allows the novel to speak for itself. Although I have written a novel about an event that occurred 1,012 years ago, I know that it necessarily speaks of our time (…) So, The ability of novels to speak for themselves is something that one as a writer has to give up and not be thinking of injecting into the novel, in a crafty way, certain contemporary conflicts. I know that it will have them for itself if we resort to the classic ideas about the novel. I have to declare myself an heir to the classics.
One of the books on which the novel of Tuscany was based, the author explained, is Skylitzes Matritensis, published in the 12th century by Juan Escilitzes, which addresses the reigns of Byzantine emperors from the beginning of the 9th century to the middle of the 11th.
“Madrid is the source of this wonderful book to tell the history of the Balkans from a text that is a jewel in the world of libraries,” Toscana added.
The rest of the jury was made up of the writers Agustina Bazterrica (Argentina) and Brenda Navarro (Mexico), as well as the cultural journalist Óscar López (Spain) and the editor Camila Enrich Schröder (Spain), as well as Pilar Reyes, editorial director of the Literary Division of Penguin Random House, with voice but no vote.
