Antonio Muñoz Molina, on March 15, 2019.álvaro García

It is one of the most prestigious literary awards in Europe: the Médicis Étranger is awarded each year to the best work of fiction translated in France.

And although almost all the awards in that country have been postponed this year (including the Goncourt, the Interallié or the French Academy) while waiting for the bookstores to reopen, closed until December 1, it has not been the case with the Medici.

Yesterday it was made public that the winner in the category of best foreign novel is Antonio Muñoz Molina for his book

(Seix Barral), published in Spain in 2018, and translated into French in 2020.

The writer and president of the jury, Marie Darrieussecq, described it as "a dream that will allow us to wander through cities and in dreams during these times of confinement."

In the French category,

, by Chloé Delaume, and in rehearsal Karl Ove Knausgaard, for

, the sixth part of his autobiographical series,

was awarded

.

The jury was made up of Marianne Alphant, Michel Braudeau, Marie Darrieussecq, Dominique Fernandez, Anne F. Garréta, Patrick Grainville, Andreï Makine, Frédéric Mitterand, Pascale Roze and Alain Veinstein.

The Spanish writer, who received the news at his home in Madrid and attended the French media in a telematic press conference, explained, shortly after in a telephone conversation, that since his debut in the eighties with

, he has always had excellent translators in the neighboring country and good labels to publish your work.

Although the links with Anglo-Saxon culture become more evident in his work, he has consolidated a relationship with readers in France that he defines as “healthy, because it has been built over time”.

I knew he was nominated for the award - which Enrique Vila Matas won for

more than a decade ago - but the news was a pleasant surprise.

'Flâneur' gatherer

The cities of New York, Madrid, Lisbon or Paris cross the pages of

, a book that Muñoz Molina (Úbeda, 64 years old) describes as “very risky”.

The walks on which he built it made him lose interest in another novel he was working on at the time.

And he ended up curdling his wandering, his reinterpretation of the

or urban explorer that he was collecting from brochures, papers and conversations he came across.

“The book took shape as it progressed.

I thought it was going to be a catastrophe, "he says.

Is it your freest work?

“Yes, and that is why I was especially happy about the award.

One of the things that can be learned in life is to be completely free.

In the syncopated rhythm of the peculiar novel and the references to other literary and modern walkers such as Baudelaire, Poe or De Quincey, the academic of the language and author of some twenty books establishes a link with journalism.

The present is narrated in that brief and accelerated way and these authors published in newspapers, explains Muñoz Molina, a columnist for Babelia.

"There is no contradiction, journalism is literature and there is good and bad," he argues.

If modernity develops in the big city and finds in the newspapers the place to leave its mark, will these spaces end with this pandemic?

"The cities in Spain have been abandoned to a tourism that has entered into crisis," he explains.

“Now there are very strong debates;

it is an exciting moment.

And without newspapers, it has become clear that democracy is not saved.

Free journalism, not libel, is a democratic foundation ”.

The writer has not been able to attend the announcement and award ceremony directly in Paris, a city that has been confined from Friday to December 1.

Muñoz Molina continues with his walks although he has already stopped collecting leaflets and brochures.