Photo Guillermo Martínez: @Rodrigo Fernández. Photo Marc Artigau: RAC website.
They are the first of the year, both coincide on the date of the Kings Day and they have taken place in Barcelona. The prestigious Nadal prize and Josep Pla of prose in Catalan. Have fallen to the writers Guillermo MartinezBy The Guilford Papers, and Marc Artigau by The wake. And the latter have not been exempt from controversy, unfortunately alien to the literary. But what would be a self-respecting act of these without its point of pepper and shock.
Nadal prize
It is the longest-lived award, and also the one they consider the most prestigious, of the national letters. And this year his 75 º aniversario. And something unusual has happened: that its winner is Latin American. The Argentinian Guillermo Martinez the cat has been taken to the water with the manuscript The Guildford Papers, which he had presented under a pseudonym, and whose final title of the novel is Alice's crimes.
It is the continuation of a previous one, that of The Oxford crimes, which put Martínez at the top in 2003 with the Premio Planeta Argentina and which led to the Álex de la Iglesia cinema in 2008. In this case the key to solving all the riddles is not found in mathematics, but in Alice, the character created by Lewis Carroll.
The plot is set in 1994 and we are still in the prestigious British university, this time in the bosom of a hermetic brotherhood dedicated to Lewis Carroll. In it there will be a series of horrifying crimes and the person in charge of investigating them will again be the Professor of Logic Arthur Seldom.
Josep Pla Award
The writer and playwright Marc Artigau has been the winner of 51 Josep Pla award of Catalan prose and endowed with 6.000, with his novel The wake. It was also presented under the pseudonym of Joan Ramírez i Ramírez and with the title L'habitació de l'estiu.
The play tells a story of intrigue where the protagonist is Raimon, a writer of stories (something he shares with his creator), who narrates them on the radio, and who lives with his brother, Blai, who suffered a traffic accident. One day they will offer you the opportunity to write a biography of an older womanbut you will soon realize that there is something strange behind that commission. So you will have to make decisions that will put you between a rock and a hard place.
The author has generated a great controversy by statements of political tone he delivered during the award ceremony. Those words have produced reactions from all areas and have heated the environment more social than literary.