Najat El Hachmi, winner of the Nadal Award for They will love us on Monday

The writer Najat El Hashmi is the last winner of the Nadal prize delivered yesterday in Barcelona, ​​with the novel Monday they will love us. The Josep Pla Award that fell on Maria barbalBy Tandem.

Nadal prize

As each Kings Day was granted yesterday in Barcelona this prestigious literary award that has gone to the writer Najat El Hashmi for his novel Monday they will love us, to be published on 10 February en Destino Editions.

Obviously, due to the health situation that we continue to live, the Nadal ceremony was held without the usual gala dinner at the Palace Hotel from Barcelona. There was simply a simple act before the media and the jury, which this year consisted of the writers Care Santos, Andrés Trapiello, Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Lorenzo Silva and Emili Rosales.

The Hachmi succeeds Anna Merino as winner of the Nadal Prize and becomes the 17th writer to win the award since Carmen laforet receive him for his novel Nada in 1944. Endowed with 18.000 euros, this edition has broken a record of participants, and Monday they will love us it has been imposed on the 1.044 manuscripts submitted.

Najat El Hashmi

Born in Morocco, but resident in Spain from the age of eight, grew up in the neighborhood of Vic. Graduated in Arabic Philology, debuted in literature with an autobiographical text, I am Catalan too, published in 2004. Four years later he won the Ramon Llull Prize with The last patriarch, an international success translated into several languages ​​in which it already dealt with machismo in Islam and which began a trilogy with the titles of The foreign daughter (2015) and Mother of milk and honey (2018)

Monday they will love us is first novel who writes in Spanish. Star it two women, of Muslim origin, who are looking for their niche and their freedom in a society where they seem to have everything against them: their sex, their origin and that social class.

finalists

They have been five finalists who have reached that selection of the jury:

1. Something temporaryby Paula Carrasco;
2. A happy coupleby Werner Heisenberg (pseudonym);
3. The key to the mirrorby Maria del Pilar Torres Navarro;
4. Intruders, by Cristina López (also pseudonym), and
5. Maybe in fallby Consuelo López-Zuriaga.

Josep Pla Award

Also at the Nadal ceremony, the Josep Pla de narrative in Catalan, which ended up in the hands of the writer Maria barbal for his novel Tandem.

A personal note

This year I have to say that I feel a little mine this Nadal Award because I was lucky —and the confidence in my work of its author, Consuelo Lopez-Zuriaga- of read and correct his novel, that Maybe in fall that has been finalist. So i I publicly thank your enthusiastic announcement email and also weighting for that invisible work still for so many but so fundamental so that a work looks in the best possible way if it already has, in addition, good narrative material.

Sources: El Mundo y Last minute.