Manuel Vilas wins the Nadal Award three years after the Planet

• Nadal 2022 Inés Martín Rodrigo and restorative literature

• Nadal 2021 Najat El Hachmi and me against us

• Nadal 2019 Ana Merino, gated community

The Aragonese poet and novelist Manuel Vilas received yesterday in Barcelona the 79th Nadal Prize thanks to the novel

, which he presented under the pseudonym Emily Watson and the provisional title of

.

The award, decided by a jury in which the writers Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Care Santos, Lorenzo Silva, Andrés Trapiello and Emili Rosales participated, has an endowment of 30,000 euros and foresees the launch of the novel on February 1 with the label from Destino, the editorial that

since 1944. Since the year of Nada, by Carmen Laforet.

What is already known about Us?

The original title and the pseudonym used by Vilas suggest Regency-style romantic literature.

But the first description that the publishers of the novel have prepared does not go exactly that way.

According to Fate, Us is about a woman named Irene, a contemporary of ours who readers will meet in the "Happiest Marriage in the World" finale.

, her husband, dies, and Irene feels that "her world is breaking up."

In order to rebuild her life, Vilas's character will undertake a trip around the Mediterranean "that will discover a way of living with him in an unusual way."

Thus, mourning, one of the themes that has marked the narrative of the last decade, is also one of the issues of Nosotros, just as it was in

, the novel by

that won Nadal in 2022.

If we search Vilas's work, there are also omens for such an approach.

, the book that established its author as a storyteller and which won the Women's Award in France, spoke of

, although in that case, the storyteller's challenge was to heal the wounds of a tormented filiation, not to immortalize a happy love like

.

La alegría

, the novel by Vilas that received the Premio Planeta in 2020, also seems related to the new novel by Vilas, since it deals with

.

Lastly,

, Vilas's next novel, dealt with an

.

The type of marriage that anyone could attribute to Irene and Marcelo, the characters in Nosotros, before meeting them.

Manuel Vilas (Barbastro, 1962) was relevant as a poet before as a narrator.

He published his first book of verse in 1990 but it was in the following decade that he built his good name as

, steeped in references to pop culture and literature in English, and owner of some themes. recognizable: parents, suicide, the loneliness of provincial cities, alcohol and drugs, Rome, hotels... This same year, the Lumen publishing house published

, a selection of poems chosen by the author.

The poet came to storytelling from non-fiction.

Vilas has written

-style accounts of his obsessions with him

.

In reality,

was not exactly a novel either, but rather a brutal and lyrical memoir that insisted on and amplified many of the themes of Vilas's poetry.

Since then, the narrative books of the author, who has lived for years between the United States and Madrid, have been directed more and more towards the strictly novelistic.

To the point that in

, for example,

.

Together with the Nadal Award ruling, Destino has announced the 55th Josep Pla Award, reserved for novels written in

.

The winner was the journalist Gemma Ventura Farré, debuting novelist and author of

.

Her story also has to do with mourning and intimacy: a young woman watches over her grandfather in a town while she is dying.

"Imagination and memory" will be, according to its editors, his tools to make a bad experience a valuable experience.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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