The writer from Jaén, David Uclés, has won the 82nd edition of the Premio Nadal for his novel 'The City of Dead Lights', a work of magical realism set in a darkened Barcelona. The award, worth 30,000 euros, was presented at the traditional January 6 evening at Barcelona's Hotel Palace. In the same ceremony, Francesc Torralba received the Premio Josep Pla for 'Anatomy of Hope'.
The Premio Nadal, the oldest award in Spanish letters, has gone in its 82nd edition to David Uclés (Úbeda, 1990) for 'The City of Dead Lights', a novel imagining a 24-hour blackout in postwar Barcelona, where intellectuals and celebrities from different eras try to restore the light. The jury, made up of Víctor del Árbol, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Inés Martín Rodrigo, Care Santos, and Emili Rosales, unanimously selected this work from 1,207 manuscripts submitted. Uclés, who entered under the pseudonym Oriol Arce and the title 'Another Summer Day Roars', described the novel as 'a love letter to the city' and highlighted its inspiration from authors like Mercè Rodoreda, Montserrat Roig, and Carmen Laforet, to whom he dedicated the prize in Catalan: 'Without their words, without their writing, this novel would not exist'.
The work, to be published on February 4 by Destino (Planeta group), continues the magical realism style of his previous success, 'The Peninsula of Empty Houses' (Siruela, 2024), which has sold 300,000 copies. Characters like Carmen Laforet —accidentally the cause of the blackout—, Antoni Gaudí, Freddie Mercury, Roberto Bolaño, Ana María Matute, and even Ramón y Cajal converge in a temporal crossroads, with surreal touches like Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes convincing Mario Vargas Llosa not to have heart surgery. Uclés, who has entered the Nadal annually from 2010 to 2020 and resumed this summer thanks to the Montserrat Roig grant, thanked his family, agents, and Siruela: 'I am the writer I am thanks to them; I love them, they are also my family'.
In parallel, the Premio Josep Pla for Catalan prose, worth 10,000 euros, went to philosopher Francesc Torralba for 'Anatomy of Hope', an essay on the mechanisms of hope in times of crisis. Torralba, a doctor in several fields and prolific author, defended his work as a 'countercultural discourse' against apocalyptic narratives: 'Without hope it is impossible to live, build, and project futures'. Both works will hit shelves on the same day.
