The writer continues with ‘Nosotros’ in the vital line he opened after ‘Ordesa’ and wins the award three years after his partner, Ana Merino
Manuel Vilas (Barbastro, Huesca, 60 years old), is the winner of the Nadal Prize for Novels, the Dean of Literary Awards, who was canceled this Friday evening in Barcelona for the 79th edition. The Aragonese writer, recent finalist of the Planeta, protects his palmares with this award, which he received thanks to a sentimental and vitalist work that he has given the title ‘Nosotros’.
Thanks to her, the prize money of 30,000 euros is pocketed, the highest in its long history, because until last year the check for the prestigious and almost eighty-year-old prize was only 18,000, which was paid by her predecessor, Inés Martín Rodrigo, for ‘ The forms of will’.
Vilas presented his novel under the pseudonym ‘Emil Watson’ and with the provisional title ‘La enamora del viento’. The Aragonese writer and collaborator of the Vocento newspapers adds to his list of prizes the esteemed prize awarded three years ago by his partner, also a writer Ana Merino (Madrid, 51 years old), daughter of the writer and academic José María Merino who won with ‘El map of affections’, his first novel. For example, they are one of the exclusive couples who can display two Nadal trophies in their living room, like in their time Sánchez Ferlosio and Martín Gaite.
A writer associated in recent years with the publishing house founded by José Manuel Lara Hernández, finalist for Planeta in 2019 with ‘Alegría’ and following the publication of ‘Los besos’ in 2021, Vilas focuses on the same vitalist theme with a story about love and loneliness. A sentimental and emotional story that is thus built on the memory and invocation of the protagonist who was the love of her life.
It tells the adventures of Irene, a woman of today, who after living what she considered the most perfect marriage in the world, with the loss of Marcelo, her husband, will see her world come crashing down. He then decides to embark on a journey along the Spanish Mediterranean coast in which he will discover an unusual way to live with him in order to progress.
Vilas has consolidated his unique literary profile from poetry to autofiction with ‘Ordesa’, his first major success catapulting his career in 2018 with twenty editions, so many translations and more than 100,000 copies sold that he would continue with ‘Alegría’. ‘Ordesa’ was his personal search for his family past and a portrait of a lost Spain with which the writer has a love-hate relationship. He began writing it days after his mother’s death, in May 2014, following their divorce, and was spurred on “by a lot of feelings that I didn’t know existed and had something haunting about them”.
He studied Spanish philology and worked for more than twenty years as a secondary school teacher in various institutions. He became known as a poet with ‘El cielo’ (2000), and he chained ‘Resurrección’ (2005), ‘Calor’ (2008), ‘Gran Vilas’ (2012), ‘El sinkimiento’ (2015) and ‘Una sola vida’ (2021), autobiographical, existential and critical poems with the Spain of his time that won him the Jaime Gil de Biedma, Fray Luis de León or Ciudad de Melilla prize.
‘España’ (2008) opened his narrative career. They followed titles such as ‘Aire nuestro’ (2009), ‘Los inmortales’ (2012) and ‘El luminoso regalo’ (2013), the storybooks ‘Zeta’ (2014), ‘Seven hundred million rhinoceroses’ (2015), and two several volumes that cannot be labeled: ‘Lou Reed was Spanish’ (2016) – mixes youthful memory and an imaginative recreation of the former leader of the Velvet Underground’s travels through Spain -, and ‘Listen to me’ (2013), collection of their Facebook states.
Winner of the 2015 Aragonese Letters Award, Vilas is a permanent signature of Colpisa and several literary attachments. He lives halfway between Madrid and Iowa City, where Ana Merino teaches creative literature.
A total of 997 works were submitted for this edition of Nadal, of which only five made it to the finals. The jury that awarded Vilas consisted of the writers Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Care Santos, Lorenzo Silva, Andrés Trapiello and the editor Emili Rosales.
On the same night, the 55th edition of the Josep Pla Prize for prose in Catalan was awarded, this year with 10,000 euros compared to 6,000 in the previous edition. They went to the young journalist Gemma Ventura Farré (El Vendrell, Tarragona, 32 years old) for her first novel ‘La llei de l’hivern’ (‘The Law of Winter’). He presented it under the tentative title ‘Quan obri els ulls, apareixeràs’ (‘When I open my eyes, you will appear) and under the pseudonym Laura Vallclara.
Source: La Verdad
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