Julio Llamazares has received Spain’s National Narrative Prize for 2026. His book follows his father’s journey through the Civil War and the scars it left behind.
Alfaguara published El viaje de mi padre in autumn 2025. The book follows the route Julio Llamazares’s father took after being called up during the Spanish Civil War, including the fronts of Teruel and the Sierra de Espadán.
Llamazares has now received the Premio Nacional de Narrativa 2026 for the work. The prize is worth €30,000. It is Spain’s annual state award for the best work of fiction written in Spanish, established by the country’s Ministry of Culture, according to reports by EFE and El País.
The journey passes through places where memories of war and postwar hardship remain visible. The book reads as a travel account, a family reconstruction and a record of rural Spain after years of depopulation.
The Premio Nacional de Narrativa carries a €30,000 prize and is awarded annually by Spain’s Ministry of Culture for the best fiction written in Spanish.
Llamazares is 71. He was born in Vegamián, León, in 1955. He is a writer, journalist and screenwriter.
The jury chose the book for its memorial and human depth. Its assessment describes a narrative built around memories, wounds and unanswered questions. It also shows how the traces of war remain in the land itself.
ABC gave the book a similar reading. Its coverage connects geographical displacement with the way identity formed across several generations.
That is where the prize carries weight.
Llamazares does not turn the conflict into a heroic episode. He links personal memory to geography instead. The jury praised the way he brings private recollection together with historical perspective.
Journeys and forced movements shaped the identity of several generations, the jury said. It also praised his poetic, polished and restrained prose. Landscapes and characters carry the movement between space, history and literature.
Several reports interpret the book as an intimate rebellion against oblivion and historical amnesia, rather than simply a family chronicle. That reading places Llamazares’s reconstruction within a broader debate about how Spain remembers the Civil War and its aftermath.
The dedication makes the book’s position clear. Llamazares dedicated it to those who lost the Spanish Civil War on both sides, to those who lose every war and to his siblings.
He described the book above all as a tribute to his father. It is also dedicated to young people who lost their lives or their youth.
The award adds to a career that has moved across several literary forms. Llamazares began with poetry in La lentitud de los bueyes in 1979 and Memoria de la nieve in 1982.
His strongest reputation came through novels such as Luna de lobos, La lluvia amarilla, Escenas de cine mudo, El cielo de Madrid, Las lágrimas de San Lorenzo, Distintas formas de mirar el agua and Vagalume.
He has also published journalism and travel writing. Those books include El río del olvido, Trás-os-Montes, Cuaderno del Duero, Las rosas de piedra, Atlas de la España imaginaria, El viaje de don Quijote and Las rosas del sur.
ABC and elDiario.es place this mix of poetry, prose, essay and travel writing at the centre of his literary method.
His public work has covered cultural memory and practical civic subjects. An earlier flu report from the same wider Spanish news agenda showed that contrast. In Llamazares’s case, the focus is different. He writes about the way a country stores its past in roads, villages and family stories.
The jury included Maite Salord, Rosa Agost Canó, Carmen Alemany Bay, Miguel Barrero Vázquez, José Belmonte Serrano, Mayte Antona, Brígida Manuela Pastor Pastor, Ramón Rozas Domínguez and Paco Cerdà. Cerdà won the previous edition for Presentes.
Earlier recipients included Raúl Quinto, Pilar Adón, Marilar Aleixandre, Xesús Fraga, Juan Bonilla, Cristina Morales, Almudena Grandes and Fernando Aramburu.
Llamazares’s award recognises one book and a restrained literary method. His father’s route becomes a shared record of Spain’s unresolved memory.
