The writer, novelist, columnist and professor received the 2022 National Prize for Letters on Monday
Luis Landero Duranrecognized this Monday with the 2022 National Prize for Letters, is one of the most prominent authors of Spanish literature and has a work focused on portraying the human condition from closeness and humor.
For Landero, literature is “a fundamental part of our life, like oxygen and philosophy, without which we could not live even if we were reluctant to deny their existence”.
Writer, novelist, columnist and teacher, has received, among other awards, the Critics and National Prize for Literature in 1990 for his first novel ‘Games of the late age’ (1989), the Mariano José de Larra Prize 1992 for his article “Learn to the asylum! ” published in the newspaper El País and the Extremadura Medal in 2005.
Born March 25, 1948 in Albuquerque (Badajoz, Extremadura), from a peasant family, began writing poetry at the age of 14. Later, when he began his studies in Hispanic Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he graduated, he began to write short stories and narratives.
During the university stage, he also made a living as a professional flamenco guitarist -he came to music “running away from the office”- and with other jobs, in a workshop, a grocery store, a judicial office or an advertising agency.
Later, he was assistant professor in a French chair at the Complutense University and professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the Emilia Pardo Bazán High School in Madrid.
From 1991 and for years he combined literary activity with teaching at the Higher School of Dramatic Art (Resad) in Madrid. And in 1995 he was a visiting professor at Yale University (United States).
He is a declared defender of literature that “bites, moves, stirs and disturbs the reader”, as he told the press in 2002, after having participated with Baccalaureate students in Zaragoza in a colloquium to encourage reading.
In 1989 he published his first novel, ‘Late Age Games’, which narrates the life of a mature man who recovers the literary illusions of his youth by posing as the poet Augusto Farami.
The book was a great critical success, which considered it a return to Kafka’s metamorphosis and Cervantes’ idealism, and was distinguished with the Icarus Awards for new creators of ‘Diario 16’ (1989), of the Critic (1990) , National Literature Award (1990), the Grinzane Cavour Award for Literature (1992) for its Italian version and the Mediterranean Award for the best foreign work (1992).
Then came his novels ‘Knights of Fortune’ (1994), ‘The Apprentice Magician’ (1999) -recognized in 2000 with the Extremadura Prize for Creation for the best literary work by an Extremaduran author-, ‘El guitarra’ (2002), ‘Today, Jupiter’ (2007) and ‘Portrait of an immature man’ (2009).
Landero, for whom “writing is like breathing” and who considers that the important thing about a novel “is that it conveys life, that it is not a mausoleum”, published in 2002 the book ‘This is my land’ and, in 2012, his seventh novel -‘Absolución’-, in which he returned to face the chiaroscuro of life.
‘The winter balcony’ (2014), is an autobiographical book, in which he takes up his own life, from his childhood in his town with his family until his arrival, also with his family, in the neighborhood of “la Prospe”, in the Madrid of the sixties.
His next job was ‘The negotiable life’ (2017), about the negotiation of guilt and the power that a secret gives. A novel that the author considers “bittersweet” like real life and that was recognized as the best literary work of the year by an Extremaduran author when he won the 2017 Centrifugados award.
In 2019 he published one of his most acclaimed works, ‘Fine Rain’, a story about grudges in a family and the limits of truth. It won the 2020 Madrid Critics Award and was considered the best book of the year by numerous specialized media.
Introducing that novel, the writer affirmed that Spain is “a family with bad avenues where tragedy is chewed”, just as it happens in “Lluvia fina”.
In 2021 came ‘Emerson’s Garden’, also autobiographical, and in 2022 “A ridiculous story”.
In the first, the author intertwines his childhood memories in his town of Extremadura, those of his adolescence just arrived in Madrid or those of the young man who begins to work, with stories and scenes lived in books during those stages.
An anthology of moments from his past with which Landero went “for a walk” through his past to see “what he found”, as he pointed out in an interview with EFE.
The second, ‘A ridiculous story’, is a comedy about the adverse situations experienced by Marcialhypersensitive gentleman who disguises his insecurity as misanthropy, love and hate are approached from humor, irony and the grotesque.
Simple and very close, for Landero being a writer is something too diffuse to be considered a profession or a trade. “There are professional writers who play it safe and when they start writing a story, they are convinced that it will work out for them. I am not,” he assured EFE in 2021.
“I don’t feel professional at all about the craft of writing, even though I’ve been doing it my whole life.”