Luis Landero (Alburquerque, 1948) has been awarded the National Prize for Spanish Letters awarded by the Ministry of Culture and is endowed with 40,000 euros. The award is the most important of the Spanish letters and rewards authors in any of the languages of the State.
The jury has highlighted the author of Games of the late age "for being an extraordinary narrator, creator of numerous fictions with characters and atmospheres of great expressiveness and excellent writing, recovering the Cervantes tradition with mastery of humor and irony and brilliantly incorporating the role of the imagination”.
In addition, the jury pointed out that “Landero belongs to the first generation of Spanish democracy and has played a fundamental role in the renewal of our literature. His first novel, published in 1989, was a literary and, in a way, historical milestone. He has maintained, with the same eagerness, the pulse and originality that already appeared in his literary beginnings and that has led him to preserve among his readers an enormous capacity for amazement”.
Born in Alburquerque, Cáceres, in 1948, in 1960 he moved to Madrid with his family. He began working at the age of 14 in various trades such as an apprentice in a mechanical workshop, a delivery boy in a grocery store or an administrative assistant in a dairy plant. After the death of his father in 1964 he devoted himself professionally to flamenco guitar, accompanying various singers for a few years.
He studied Hispanic Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid and worked there as assistant professor of French Philology. He was a professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the Calderón de la Barca Institute in Madrid, at the School of Dramatic Art in the same city and at Yale University.
His first novel, Late Age Games, published in 1989, won the National Prize for Fiction and the Critics' Prize. She has published 16 books, 11 of them 11 novels, which have marked the last decades of Spanish literature, occupying a prominent place in what was called "new Spanish narrative". Among his works, the following stand out, along with Late Age Games: Knights of Fortune (1994), The Magical Apprentice (1999), The Guitarist (2002), Portrait of an Immature Man (2009), Absolution (2012), The Negotiable Life (2017), Fine Rain (2019), Emerson's Garden (2021) or A Ridiculous Story (2022).
