The 51-year-old writer suffered a heart attack the same day his publisher announced the reissue of the book with which he won the Hammet Prize in 2014
As if it were a dramatic turn in one of his novels, at the same time that the Alrevés publishing house announced the reissue of ‘La estrategia del pequinés’, the work that in 2014 earned him the Hammet Prize of the Black Week in Gijón, the title that put him on the Spanish literary map, confirmed that Alexis Ravelo (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1971) had just died at the age of 51, the victim of a heart attack, on the island where he was born and which he turned into a stage of many of his literary creations. The novel that elevated him as a benchmark for the crime genre in Spain will indeed return to the shelves on February 13, in a special revised edition to commemorate the tenth anniversary of its publication. A story that was also taken to the cinema by Elio Quiroga in 2019, with a cast headed by Unax Ugalde and Kira Miró.
Ingenious, reflective, educated, a tireless reader and a meticulous writer, Ravelo defined himself as “a bald writer who was born and still survives on a diet of beers and sandwiches and who, against all odds, occupies a relevant place in the narrative. current Spanish. This is how the flaps of his books proclaim it. After some brilliant dabbling with the story, his first novel was ‘Three funerals for Eladio Monroy’ (2006), starring a former hustler, cynical and violent sailor, who inaugurated the series made up of ‘Only the dead’, ‘The types Hard people don’t read poetry’, ‘Die slowly’, ‘The worst of times’ and ‘If there were no tomorrow’. He also signed ‘The night of stone’, ‘The days of mercury’, ‘Flowers don’t bleed’, ‘The other life of Ned Blackbird’, ‘The blindness of the crab’ and ‘A guy with a bag over his head’ .
Ravelo, who worked as a waiter in his youth, studied Pure Philosophy at the UNED and attended creative workshops given by Mario Berlino, Augusto Monterroso and Alfredo Bryce Echenique until he made a more than deserved niche in Canarian letters. Playwright, screenwriter and author of children’s and youth books, he made the leap to the national literary scene thanks to the award he received in Gijón. «The first time I won an important prize was the Hammet. It was my ninth novel, but they had barely left the islands, and that was the one that gave me the accolade”, he recounted after winning another prestigious award in 2021, the Café Gijón Award, for his novel ‘Los nombres prestados’ (Siruela) , a noir story, halfway between a western and a thriller, which brings together in a small town in Spain, in the mid-eighties, two characters who, using false names, try to flee from their past.
cultural activist
“They are two people who have caused a lot of pain from different sides of the political struggle. Terrorism and state repression. The novel takes place in the mid-80s, so themes like the GAL come out in the background. The question I asked myself was what happens to these people when they get older and discover the pain they have caused. How do they sleep at night? One of the motors of the novel is that question », the author explained about his second great literary success.
Ravelo, who co-founded the literary magazine ‘La Plazuela de las Letras’ and the Matasombras space for cultural dissemination, stood out not only in writing. An advertising scriptwriter, columnist, great conversationalist and cultural activist in the broadest sense of the word, he was recently named Favorite Son of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and was a member of the Canary Islands Language Academy. Just a couple of weeks ago, Ravelo successfully closed the III Aridane Criminal Literary Meeting held in Los Llanos, on La Palma, where he announced that he was passing the baton from the direction he had been exercising since his birth to the journalist Eduardo García Rojas. His relatives and friends, as well as the journalist Thalía Rodríguez, his partner and his accomplice, thanked yesterday the many expressions of affection conveyed by all those who knew him and the highest authorities of the Canary Islands, with President Ángel Víctor Torres at the head.
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