A few hours ago, Jorge Fernández Díaz wrote in ABC, the newspaper to which he is a regular contributor, about his first years as a journalist, back in the eighties: ‘El Diario del Neuquén’ in Argentine Patagonia. «I was an events reporter in Buenos Aires and someone convinced me to leave the city, found a newspaper in the Upper Valley of the Río Negro and Neuquén, and embark on that great adventure: the mission was to write exciting police chronicles that would raise the circulation of the newspaper, and also being editor-in-chief during the nights…”
Like so many writers, Fernández Díaz’s literary work germinated in the veins of reporting. Almost twenty titles including novels, journalistic investigation, stories, essays and fictionalized autobiographies. This last section is assigned ‘Marcial’s secret’, winner of the 2025 Nadal prize by decision of the jury that awards the 30,000 euros and made up of Care Santos, Inés Martín Rodrigo, Lorenzo Silva, Andrés Trapiello and Emili Rosales.
‘Marcial’s Secret’ completes a family cycle that Fernández Díaz opened in 2002 with ‘Mother. An intimate story’. It was the testimony of emigration through that woman who left Spain as a fifteen-year-old Asturian peasant to earn bread in Perón’s Argentina. Born in 1960 in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo, Fernández Díaz had his most acclaimed novel in ‘Mamá’. A family chronicle born from fifty hours of conversation with the mother who was silenced shortly after by Alzheimer’s: «We know little about our parents. Less than we think. “I had to investigate,” he explained to Jesús García Calero on ABC. Oral memory would reveal “things I didn’t know, family secrets, some that hurt like an attempted rape…”
In ‘El secreto de Marcial’ Fernández Díaz once again pulls the introspective thread. “If there is only one mother, each father is an enigma,” warns the Nadal winner. In this case, the need to understand who his father was, Marcial Fernandezyears after his death: «My father’s name was Marcial and when he discovered my literary vocation he gave up on me. He was a long-suffering Asturian immigrant, an affable waiter at the ABC bar – where Osvaldo Pugliese had premiered several legendary tangos -, a fan of Tyrone Power and a lover of black and white films,” he explained in another of his articles in ABC. A father who did not like that his son was a writer: “My father, upon discovering that profession, paradoxically confused literature with laziness and stopped treating me.” The conflict was resolved when father and son shared the cinematic passion for ‘How green was my valley’, by John Ford.
Double emigration
Like ‘Mamá’, the winning novel is nourished by the experience of emigration between the native Asturias and the adopted Buenos Aires. From the particular adventure – the relationship between father and son – to the collective chronicle of Spanish emigration to Latin America. “The history of emigration – what a pleasure to hear it called as it was then – is something subversive today,” says Fernández Díaz. That of his family and that of so many families was a double emigration: fleeing the miserable post-war period and having to return to Spain in 2001 due to the Argentine corralito crisis. This is said by one of the five most respected journalists in Argentina that Remil is going through, his police ‘alter ego’ in the black trilogy of ‘The Dagger’, ‘The Wound’ and ‘The Betrayal’.
Matute Centennial
This edition of Nadal in 2025 is part of the centenary of the birth of one of the most prestigious authors of Ediciones Destino: Ana María Matute. Adding to Ignacio Agustí’s merit as Nadal’s ideologist is his literary intuition: having discovered Matute when he published his first stories in the weekly ‘Destino’. The intuition was ratified in 1948: a twenty-year-old Matute participated with ‘Los Abel’ in the fourth edition of the award, which she won. ‘The shadow of the cypress is long’ by Miguel Delibes. A year later, the Barcelona author was a Nadal finalist with ‘Luciérnagas’. The novel could not be published until 1955 with the title changed – ‘In this land’ – and abundant censorship cuts. We had to wait until 1993 to see the full version of the novel with its original title. After the displeasure of ‘Luciérnagas’ came definitive recognition: Matute won the 1959 Nadal with ‘First memory’. When addressing the public, the writer, who had overcome her youthful stuttering, gave free rein to her free spirit, almost a decade after her first Nadal: “I have written and will continue to write unpleasant novels for bourgeois and aesthetic palates.” Because, as he liked to repeat – “Things about Matute!” he said – the anguish of adolescence that ran through that novel was his way of denouncing the injustices of adult life: “That incomprehension of the world, that stupor, that astonishment “before the world that exists in ‘Primera memoria’, that is deeply mine,” he assured. In the Matute de los ‘nadales’ we find the hard drive of all his subsequent work.
ANDThe Josep Pla award 2025 of Catalan narrative fell on ‘L’art de ser humans’ (The art of being human), an informative essay by David Bueno that combines Science and the Humanities to configure what the author calls ‘Homo Artísticus’.
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