The writer Raúl Quinto, born in Cartagena in 1978, has been awarded the 2024 National Narrative Prize for his work Shadow King’s Hammer (Jekyll & Jill), a book that narrates the mass arrest of the Gypsy population that took place on July 30, 1749, under the reign of Fernando VI and by order of the Marquis of La Ensenada. There are those who consider it a failed extermination project: The Great Raid. “It is an event that conditioned the lives of the entire Roma population at that time, but that continues to this day,” says the author. The prize, awarded by the Ministry of Culture, is worth 30,000 euros. The work had already received the National Critics Award and the Cálamo Otra Mirada.
The jury highlighted the work “for being a brilliant proposal that, standing on the border between genres, creates an original fictional essay of historical interpretation. With a style rich in nuances, lavish in metaphors and magnificent descriptions, Raúl Quinto presents a vigorous portrait of the period in which he accurately dissects the practices, conflicts and rites of the State of the Old Regime and the attempted extermination of a minority like the gypsy people.”
“People want to know things about the past to understand the present,” says Quinto, who has a degree in Art History and a professor of the discipline in Almería. He learned about the story of The Great Raid from a dossier in a specialized magazine and was surprised not to know about the event and, what’s more, that it did not appear in the school curriculum. “I teach history, and I teach the 18th century, to Fernando VI and the Marquis of La Ensenada, but I didn’t know anything about this and I couldn’t find it anywhere. And when I don’t understand something, I try to unravel the knot from literature,” says Quinto.
He was facing an extermination attempt that lasted 16 years and had serious consequences on the relationship between payos and gypsies. An attempted extermination that took place under a reign that presumed to be enlightened: thousands of gypsies were forced to work in arsenals and shipyards, they were imprisoned and deprived of their property. “The Great Roundup is still one more, the most notorious, of around 250 laws enacted since 1499, under the Catholic Monarchs, aimed at the disappearance of gypsies. His presence bothered him, his way of being in the world. That is a constant, and not only in Spain,” says Quinto. In Wallachia, according to what he says, the slavery of the Gypsy ethnic group was legal until the 19th century. This ethnic group has often been considered an “infectious root.”
A book that has grown little by little
The author was caught by surprise by the call from the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, doing housework on his day off. I knew that the national awards were being given, but I didn’t know that the Narrative Award was falling today. He says, very happy about the “miracle”, that this book has been growing little by little, in literary circles and reading clubs, without an explosion of sales or a media phenomenon, but winning awards, such as the aforementioned Cálamo Otra Mirada and Nacional de the Criticism. Curiously, Pilar Adón had won the same awards last year with her work Of beasts and birds (Galaxia Gutenberg), in addition to the Francisco Umbral. Slowly, step by step, Shadow King’s Hammer It is in its fourth edition.
“It is a risky book in which I have put, literary, all the meat on the grill,” says the winner, “and that is advancing against the logic of the market.” The jury has indicated that Shadow King’s Hammer It is “a round novel, with great stylistic effort and fascinating games of perspectives that sheds light on a silenced and quite unknown part of the history of Spain.”
“I am a rare UFO in the world of narrative,” says Quinto, who comes from poetry, where he has published books such as The skin of the watchman (DVD, 2005), The flower of torture (Renaissance, 2008), white noise (The Beautiful Warsaw, 2012), The broken tongue (La Bella Varsovia, 2019) or the notebook Sola (The Beautiful Warsaw, 2020). Hybrid narrative has also been given as Idioteca (El Gaviero, 2010), Yosotros (Trojan Horse, 2015) and Son (La Bella Warsaw, 2017). “This book is published by a very small publishing house, Jekyll & Jill, which has to compete for the space occupied by large groups in bookstores. These awards make me happy because they make me see that not all the cod is sold,” says Quinto.
In previous editions, the award has recognized authors such as the aforementioned Pilar Adón, Marilar Aleixandre, Xesús Fraga, Juan Bonilla, Cristina Morales, Almudena Grandes, Fernando Aramburu or Cristina Fernández Cubas, among others.