The Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez has won the Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Novel Award for his work The golden horse (Alfaguara, 2023), at a gala held at the Gran Teatro de Cáceres that ended four days of intense literary activity in Extremadura. The jury, chaired by Juan Manuel Bonet, highlighted the winning novel as “a prodigious literary, experimental, polyhedral and kaleidoscopic artifact, where reality and fiction merge and overlap in a transatlantic journey from the Carpathians to Nicaragua.”
Visibly moved, Sergio Ramírez—2017 Cervantes Prize winner and former vice president of Nicaragua, currently exiled in Madrid—dedicated the award “to all those who, along with me, live in exile and who have been stripped of their citizenship.” “I have a voice tonight,” he said, “to represent them and open a path of hope, because one day Nicaragua will once again be a free and democratic country.”
The author also recalled the influence of Mario Vargas Llosa on his generation: “We belong to a lineage of writers who learned from boom Latin American that literature could be a reason for life. Vargas Llosa taught us discipline, perseverance and faith in the word.”
In addition to Ramírez, Gustavo Faverón competed for the award (Minimal fly, Peru), Pola Oloixarac (Bad man, Argentina), Ignacio Martínez de Pisón (Fire castles, Spain), David Uclés (The peninsula of empty houses, Spain) and Gioconda Belli (A silence full of murmurs, Nicaragua). The jury highlighted the “exceptional quality” of the six works as a whole, a reflection of the vigor and diversity of narrative in Spanish.
The president of the Regional Government of Extremadura, María Guardiola, closed the event with a speech in defense of culture and freedom: “Whoever uses culture as a tool to divide is condemned to inconsequentiality. In the face of political opportunism and unruly voices, I take refuge in words.”
Guardiola stressed the historical relevance of this edition, the first held outside the American continent, and considered it “a bridge between Europe and America, between the Spanish that is written in Madrid, Lima, Buenos Aires or Managua.” He also highlighted the role of Extremadura as “a land of dialogue, capable of hosting the best of literature in Spanish.”
Authors from more than 20 countries
For his part, Raúl Tola, director of the Vargas Llosa Chair, celebrated the success of the Biennial: “This sixth edition marks a milestone: it has brought together authors from more than twenty countries, it has honored the memory of Vargas Llosa and it has consolidated Extremadura as a meeting point of Ibero-American culture.” Tola recalled that the Biennial Prize, endowed with 100,000 dollars (about 86,000 euros), recognizes “the best novel published in Spanish in the last two years and the writers’ commitment to freedom and imagination.”
The ceremony, led by Álvaro Vargas Llosa and Juan Manuel Bonet, closed four days of round tables, dialogues and tributes held in Cáceres, Badajoz and Trujillo, with the participation of more than 60 writers, editors and academics from both sides of the Atlantic. Among the most notable events were the tribute Mario, a fish in water, with the participation of Ana Belén, Ángeles Mastretta, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Pilar Reyes and other guests, and the dialogue with the six finalists, who shared their reflections on the legacy of the Peruvian Nobel Prize.
Other previous winners of the Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Biennial: 2023, The weight of living on earth, David Toscana (Mexico); 2021, Look back, Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia); 2019, The Night, Rodrigo Blanco Calderón (Venezuela); 2016, SI saw you with my eyes, Carlos Franz (Chile), or 2014, It is forbidden to enter without pants, Juan Bonilla (Spain)