The writer Raúl Quinto won the National Literature Prize in the Narration category. A recognition granted by the Ministry of Culture and which is endowed with 30,000 euros.
The jury has chosen your work Hammer of the Shadow King (Jekyll & Jill) for “being a brilliant proposition which, at the boundary between genres, creates an original fictional essay in historical interpretation”. “With a style rich in nuances, rich in metaphors and magnificent descriptions, Raúl Quinto paints a vigorous portrait of the era in which he precisely dissects the practices, conflicts and rites of the Ancien Régime State and the attempted extermination of a minority like the gypsy people.
Likewise, the jury indicated that Hammer of the Shadow King It is “a rounded novel, with great stylistic effort and fascinating plays of perspectives which sheds light on a silent and relatively little-known part of the history of Spain”.
Hammer of the Shadow King think about how the story is constructed. To do this, it starts from the reconstruction of a specific episode in the history of the 18th century in Spain, when under the reign of Ferdinand VI and on the orders of the Marquis of Ensenada, the mass arrest of the gypsy population took place. Spanish, known as the Grand Raid. The story follows the experiences of these gypsies from the night of their arrest until the 18-year amnesty granted. They go through torture, forced labor, illness or shipwreck, against the backdrop of the Court of the first Bourbons. “A series of biographies as astonishing as they are meticulously documented,” specifies its editorial.
Quinto succeeds Pilar Adón, who won the prize last year for her novel Beasts and birds (Gutenberg Galaxy).
Raúl Quinto (Cartagena, 1978), graduated in art history from the University of Granada and currently resides in Almería where he teaches as a professor. He wrote collections of poems such as The goalkeeper’s skin (DVD, 2005), The flower of torture (Renaissance, 2008), white noise (La Belle Warsaw, 2012), The broken tongue (La Bella Varsovia, 2019) or the notebook Alone (La Belle Warsaw, 2020). He has also published hybrid narrative books such as Idio library (El Gaviero, 2010), We (Trojan Horse, 2015) and Son (La Bella Warsaw, 2017).
In addition, he is one of the coordinators of the José Ángel Valente Faculty of Poetry and has collaborated as a critic in publications such as the Quimera magazine.
