The journalist Vicente Vallés has won the Primavera Prize for his novel Operation Kazan. The award organized by the Espasa publishing house and El Corte Inglés has a prize of 100,000 euros for the winning work, which will be published by Espasa, from the Planeta group.
“It is a novel full of intrigue that, from a very original perspective, raises a fictional issue that could well be the most absolute reality,” reads the jury’s decision, read by its president, Carme Riera. “I’ll tell you almost a slogan: read it, it won’t disappoint you,” summarized the writer and RAE academic.
“I am a journalist, not a professional writer and this award was not in my plans. I dedicate it to my family, my wife and my children, who have seen their father for months and months on a computer”, he said. the presenter of the Antena 3 newscast, a television channel that belongs to Atresmedia, a company that is also part of the Planeta group.
Operation Kazan is an espionage novel that spans most of the 20th and 21st century, and involves the KGB, the CIA, and the CNI. Its starting point is the birth in New York in 1992 of a child for whom the Soviet intelligence services devise a plan. Years later, Lavrenti Beria, the Bolshevik police chief, presents this plan to Stalin, who will take over the operation and turn it into a personal and extremely secret mission.
The award, inaugurated by Rosa Montero in 1997, with The cannibal’s daughter He has turned 26 years old. During this period they have received writers and personalities such as Jose Maria Perez Peridis, with The heart with which I live (2020), Juan José Millás (2002), Màxim Huerta (2014), Carme Chaparro (2017) and Pedro Simón (2021).
The Primavera Prize jury is chaired by Carme Riera and made up of Antonio Soler, Gervasio Posadas, Fernando Rodríguez Lafuente and Ana Rosa Semprún. At the press conference they highlighted that this year the theme of COVID with futuristic overtones and a return to rural areas has prevailed, “not only through melancholy and the memory of past times, but as the setting for thrillers.”
In this 2022 edition, a total of 1,428 originals have been sent. Spain contributes 694 novels, followed by Argentina and Mexico, with 223 and 110 copies respectively.
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