Nico is an 11-year-old boy who, due to an administrative error, is called to fight on the front. This is the brilliant plot thread of Nico's War, the novel with which Josan Hatero from Barcelona won the 32nd edition of the Edebé Prize for Children's Literature. In the youth category, the winner has been the Canarian writer Daniel Hernández Chambers with Kings of the Mountain, a dystopia that draws on the sources of The Lord of the Flies and Mecanoscrit del segon origin, centered on a group of 16-year-old adolescents. a center for minors who must learn to survive alone in nature due to a lethal virus that devastates the planet.
These two stories of survival approached from two very different perspectives - the current war conflicts and the coronavirus pandemic - have won one of the most recognized prizes and the best financially endowed in the country: 55,000 euros (30,000 for the youth work and 25,000 for children), for which 313 manuscripts were eligible this year.
"Nico's germ was a nightmare that I had four or five years ago: I dreamed that due to an administrative error I had to do the military again (which I already did in 1990 at the request of my father, who insisted a lot on it)" , says the author. The impact that he was faced with a good story was so overwhelming that Josan Hatero admits that he was blocked and had to let it rest. It was not until the death of his father, in 2022, that he returned to the idea: "It is a Kafkaesque situation, like in The Trial." Nico lives alone with his mother during times of war. He lost his father when he was very little. He doesn't even remember him. But he has the same name. So when one day two soldiers appear looking for Nicolas Franz, they take the boy, because they have to take a Nicolas Franz. The incongruity of seeing a child among soldiers is of no use, "because in war there is no type of logic," concludes the author.
"This is an important novel in the turbulent times we live in because it talks about war for what it is: a terrible absurdity of adults. It does not do so with pacifist speeches or with proclamations of good intentions but from within, taking us into the eye of the hurricane. of the war that overwhelms everything, starting with common sense," says Toni Iturbe, one of the jury members, regarding The War of Nico.
Kings of the Mountain is also another kind of war, the one waged on the environment with a global health crisis. "I wrote the first version of this story years ago, even before 'our' pandemic," explains Hernández Chambers, who cites an article as the germ of the book about some boy scouts camped in the Pyrenees to whom something similar happens but days before the Spanish Civil War broke out. "They were stumbling around for a year without being able to return home. He decided, however, to change the war to a lethal virus simply because I already have several works with different wars as a backdrop. Then Covid arrived," he says.
The plot is supported by a group of ten troublesome 16-year-old teenagers from a juvenile center who go camping. They have all been caught for some type of minor crime, such as theft or petty dealings. Being in the mountains they are left isolated and alone due to that lethal virus that has destroyed all civilization. "They have no choice but to live together and create a society from nothing," says its author, who believes that readers will be able to count on a wide gallery of characters with whom they can identify. "There is no single protagonist, they are all very different from each other and with very different relationships between them."
Apocalytic, adrenaline-filled, explosive dialogues are some of the highlights of Kings of the Mountain, where "the author skillfully dissects the ins and outs of the human condition through those young people who bring out the best and the worst in themselves when experiencing a situation. extreme," says Óscar López, member of the jury.
The winning works of the 32nd edition of the Edebé Awards will be published in March in paper and ebook in the four State languages, as well as in audiobook and Brail.
