The writer José María Merino is the winner of the National Prize of the Spanish Letters of 2021, organized by the Ministry of Culture and endowed with 40,000 euros.
The jury of the prize has highlighted “the Master’s and Excellence in the creation of fantastic literature in the narrative modalities of novel, short novel, story and microrrelato” of the writer, academic of the RAE since 2008. Merino joins the palmarés of the National Award
, dedicated to recognizing the whole of the literary work of a Spanish author in any of the languages of the country.
The friend of him Luis Mateo Díez, Bernardo Atxaga and Francisca Aguirre Sos the most immediate ancestors of him.
José María Merino was born in La Coruña in 1941, he spent his years of training in León and much of his adult life in Madrid.
The first books of him were of poems, early works published in the early 70s who preceded the first novel of him, Andrés Choz’s novel (1976).
The dark shore;
I am not a book;
The visions of Lucrecia;
The heir;
and the Eden River (National Narrative Award) are some of the most outstanding titles.
The work in prose of merino is a synthesis between seemingly contradictory ideas: between culteranism and the literature of evasion, between social criticism and fantasy, between philological research and pure ingenuity.
Merino himself referred to a part of him as “rare realism”.
The other party could be the opposite, a fantasy of practical applications.
The search for identity, double, metalliterate, the relations between the magical the everyday … The classical themes of the fantastic genre are part of the core of the work of it.
Merino also has a value as an innovator.
First, for being one of the few Spanish authors, at least in the generation of him, who have entered the canon from fantasy.
And second, by the role of him as a pioneer, disseminator and theoretical of the microco.
