The journalist Inés Martín Rodrigo wins the Nadal with a novel about the therapeutic power of literature

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In a new record year with 937 manuscripts, the Nadal Prize has gone to journalist

.

The most traditional award in Spanish literature and endowed with 18,000 euros has distinguished his novel

which vindicates the therapeutic and restorative power of literature.

"

to say that we tell ourselves stories to survive, that's how it has always been for me with written words ... It is also like that for Noray, the protagonist of the novel, who faced with a very serious emotional crisis, in the middle of an inconsolable mourning, he resorts to the refuge, shelter and consolation of words, as I have done so many times. And he faces the novel that he has been avoiding for so long ... ", explained Martín Rodrigo, cultural journalist for the newspaper

after collecting the award in the traditional (and sober) ceremony of the Hotel Palace in Barcelona, ​​still marked by the restrictions of the pandemic. And he has done it 78 years after

premiered Nadal with

, an event that takes on special significance this year as it closes the commemorations of the centenary of the birth of the writer.

The ways of wanting,

that Destino will publish on February 2, begins with a duel, two duels in reality, in the context of the pandemic to draw a parallel history to that of our country, from the Civil War to the 21st century. "Noray has many things about me. Life has leaked into fiction," admits Martín Rodrigo, whose mother died when she was only 14 years old. "That mourning has accompanied me all my life; it is something that cannot be cured, it is a way of living, you get used to it", confesses the writer, who has looked back at the family legacy, at her town of Extremadura to "write a tribute to our elders ". And to literature. Because literature is what saves its protagonist (and the writer herself). "Noray loves literature, she is a girl who grew up among books, as I was," he adds.And when he faces that novel that he has never been able to finish, he will heal the wounds, the pain of the duel, the absence of his grandmother. "It is not autobiographical. I have fictionalized family memories to the extreme to invent, which is a wonderful verb," ​​explains Martín Rodrigo.

In 2016, Martín Rodrigo published his first novel

(Espasa) in which he rescued the forgotten figure of the writer

one of the first Spanish war correspondents, who covered the two world wars and even interviewed Trotsky. in 1915. All the work and career of Martín Rodrigo is linked to literature: he writes about books on the pages of the newspaper, in essays, stories and novels. Also in 2016 he published an essay dedicated to the late David Foster Wallace,

, and in 2020 he compiled his chronicles and interviews in

(Debate), where he delved into the meaning of being a writer and a woman based on his conversations with

or

.

In an obvious homage to Virginia Woolf in the title, she mapped the great contemporary writers.

Josep Pla Award for Toni Cruanyes

The Catalan version of Nadal, the Josep Pla Prize (gold with 6,000 euros) has also been for another journalist,

popular face of the TV3 news program. With

he makes his debut "in the genre of memorialistic narrative, practically grating the novel", he admits. Since the death of his grandfather in a nursing home during the first wave of COVID, Cruanyes has delved into the family legacy to tell "the story of a time, of a country." "It is a tribute to a whole generation of men and women who survived a war and who have had to face a pandemic at the end of their life," he stressed. A theme very similar to that of Martín Rodrigo, although it is far from fiction.

Just 10 years ago, Cruanyes already won the Joan Fuster essay award for

that he wrote after his time as a correspondent in Paris before the rise of the most radical right.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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