The Argentine writer and journalist Jorge Fernández Díaz (Buenos Aires, 1960), winner this Monday night of the 81st Nadal Prize for novels, is a veteran journalist and a reference in crime and mystery novels as a writer.
Previously, on the same evening, the winner of the 57th edition of the Josep Pla Prize for prose in Catalan was announced, endowed with 10,000 euros, which went to the scientific popularizer and educator David Bueno, hidden behind the pseudonym ‘ Carro de Foc’ for ‘L’art de ser humans’, an essay that proposes a fascinating journey through the arts, neuroscience and education, which he had presented with the fictitious title ‘Quan l’esser humà awakens’.
At the proclamation ceremony, Fernández Díaz, who had presented himself for the award under the pseudonym Daniel Ocampo, won the Nadal with a novel that had the provisional title of ‘Marcial’.
Born in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo, Fernández Díaz has written fiction since 1972 and has been a professional journalist since 1981, when while studying at the School of Journalism of the Grafotécnico Institute he created Retruco, an alternative magazine against the Argentine military dictatorship, and since then he has combined both vocations, which have writing in common.
As a journalist, he conducted investigations for the magazines Qué and El Periodista, and worked at the Argentine newspaper La Razón before becoming editor-in-chief of El Diario de Neuquén in Patagonia. Later, he was recruited as editorial secretary of El Cronista and was deputy director of the magazine Gente, the newspaper Perfil and the magazine Noticias, which he managed from 2000 onwards.
Since 2002, he has been editorial secretary of the centenary newspaper La Nación, the second largest circulation in the country, and since 2007 he has also directed the newspaper’s cultural magazine, ADN Cultura, which he founded. Likewise, since 2020 he has periodically published an article under the title ‘Written in Argentina’ on the cultural website Zendalibros, and is a columnist for the cultural supplement of the Spanish newspaper ABC.
His fiction work began in 1985 with the crime novel ‘The Murder of the Left Wing’ and continued with ‘The Dilemma of the Heroes: Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Masked Argentine’, in which the popular Holmes investigates alongside Borges.
In non-fiction, Fernández Díaz is the author of the unauthorized biography of the late Argentine journalist Bernardo Neustadt, ‘The man who invented himself’ (1993), and of the police saga starring agent Remil composed of ‘El puñal’ (2014), ‘The Wound’ (2017) and ‘The Betrayal’ (2021)
The Spanish Government awarded him the Medal of Hispanic Heritage in 2003 for the successful ‘Mamá’ (2001), a work in which he tells the story of his own mother, an Asturian who was sent to Argentina at the age of 15 to escape poverty. in the post-Franco war. In 2006, he published ‘Fernández’, a novel in which he narrates the misadventures of his generation, an alter ego character of the journalist who returned in 2009 with ‘The Second Life of Flowers’.
The author was awarded in 2008 by the Association of Argentine Journalistic Entities (ADEPA) for the series of eight installments published in La Nación in which he recreated the exploits of José de San Martín in the Battle of Bailén (1808), which was the genesis from the novel ‘La logia de Cádiz’, which he published that same year.
Fernández Díaz has also cultivated short stories and chronicles, with titles such as ‘Unleashed Hearts’ (2007), ‘The Brotherhood of Honor’ (2010) or ‘The Loneliest Women in the World’ (2012); or the essay, with ‘An Argentine history in real time’ (2021).
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