The filmmaker Luis López Carrasco wins the Herralde Novel Prize

The Herralde Novel Prize has a winner again this year, after being declared void last year for the first time in its 40-year history. It has been won by filmmaker Luis López Carrasco (Murcia, 1981), known for directing El año del descubrimiento (The Year of Discovery), winner of the Goya for best documentary film two years ago. This time the awarded work has been El desierto blanco (The White Desert), a novel that talks about the generation of the last economic crisis. Almost 1,600 manuscripts were submitted to this edition of the award, endowed with 25,000 euros. 

Coming from where he comes from, López Carrasco cannot avoid letting slip more than once a "I have thought of this film…" when he starts to explain what his novel is about. Forgetting the slips, the filmmaker and writer began to think about El desierto blanco more than ten years ago, in the midst of the recession, "a moment in which, for my generation, the harshness of the crisis was more marked." At that time, he recalls that, repeatedly, "every month, every two weeks," a friend would spend the night at his house because the next day they had to catch a plane to emigrate to another country. "It stayed inside me," he admits. It was that residue that encouraged him years later to write the novel with which he has won the prize awarded by the Anagrama publishing house. 

To talk about that trauma, the writer places his narrator "in an uncertain future from which he recalls memories of his past." "It is a generational memory, but also an effort to trace the happy moments and the darkness that surrounded him and that perhaps would explain why he was expelled far from there, to a foreign place," defends its author. "A story that is that of our lives: modern work, organized tourism, friendship and its rituals, the family narrative, memory as pain and as consolation," adds Gonzalo Pontón Guijón, a member of the jury. 

In this 41st edition of the Herralde Novel Prize, López Carrasco is accompanied by Camila Fabbri (Buenos Aires, 1989) as a finalist. The writer, also a playwright and film director, has won silver with La reina del baile (The Queen of the Ball), "a novel that she began to write as a short story and it became long, long." In her case, the plot begins with an accident, a recurring theme in her stories, as can be guessed from titles such as Los accidentes (The Accidents) (2015) and Estamos a salvo (We Are Safe) (2022), although she emphasizes that she has not suffered any. "I was never in one, but I imagine a lot what it would be like to be in one, I think about it and then I write it," she maintains.

"It is an overwhelming narration," says Gonzalo Pontón Guijón, "of a consciousness of reality so extreme that it cuts like glass." "An inner journey into a romantic breakup and an existential crisis," adds Juan Pablo Villabos, also a member of the jury, about Fabbri, who submitted the novel under the pseudonym Sarah Connor, heroine of Terminator. But it is not a clue about the plot, confesses the author, simply one of her many obsessions, "micro-fanaticisms" she calls them. She was soon replaced by singer Karen Carpenter. The focus is on music, hence the final title of the novel, which thinks of ABBA's Dancing Queen, but also of television. Both the winning novel and the finalist will be published on November 22.