Máximo Huerta has won the XXVII edition of the Fernando Lara novel prize, with Goodbye, small, a story that tells the relationship between a mother and a son in a family in which “silence is the solution to everything”.
The Valencian writer, journalist and former Minister of Culture, Máximo Huerta, has won the 27th edition of the Fernando Lara novel prize, endowed with 120,000 euros, with the novel entitled “Goodbye, small”, which recounts the relationship between a mother and a son in a family in which “silence is the solution to everything”.
As is traditional, the prize, endowed with 120,000 euros, has been awarded during a gala dinner at the Reales Alcázares in Seville.
The writer, journalist and former Valencian Minister of Culture has been emotional and in front of all the attendees and using the microphone he has called his mother to tell her the news and then affectionately ask her to go to bed now.
After receiving the award, Huerta explained to journalists that her mother will not be able to read the novel because “it has already begun to fade” and that, however, in the three years it has taken her to write it – she has qualified by saying that, in reality It is a book that he began to write from his first years of life – his mother has been his main source of information.
The author has surprised everyone by saying that the first sentence of the winning novel is: “My mother would have been happier if I had not been born”, after which he has stated about his work as a writer that “other novels will come, but none will be like this; it is the novel of my life, the one I will always remember”.
“I did not write this novel to publish it but because I needed to write it for myself; and that freedom is what also made me bring it to fruition,” assured the author, who at no time wanted to unravel his work.
Huerta has described the winning novel as “a farewell”, although he has also assured that it covers several generations, with events ranging from 1937, the year of his mother’s birth, to the present, and especially from the generation of “our parents” , who lived “in other settings, with other possibilities and other fears”.
The novel will hit bookstores on June 15, and has competed for the prize with 364 other works.
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