The leap into fiction by the chronicler Cristian Alarcón wins the Alfaguara novel prize

The confinement of 2020 is the starting point of the novel

, the first written by veteran chronicler Cristián Alarcón (La Unión, Chile, 52 years old) and with which he has won the XXV Alfaguara Prize.

Author of two important non-fiction titles

(2003) and

(2010)

the journalist, who has been able to narrate like few others in recent decades the violent urban reality of Argentina, moves away in the new work of the chronicle to delve into a story in which botany and family history make up a "dual" book, according to what he points out the jury's decision made public this Thursday afternoon at the Casino de Madrid, in which it has also been stated that it was a unanimous decision.

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Combining research and literary quality

Born in Chile, Alarcón arrived with his family in Argentina when he was just over four years old, fleeing the Pinochet dictatorship and trained as a journalist at the University of La Plata, where he now teaches.

Since the 1990s, his research has appeared in the newspapers

and

, and in magazines such as

and

.

A decade ago, he put together the digital magazine

published by UNSAM and

, the Latin American Network of Judicial Journalism, two projects that are still underway.

The protagonist of

whose simultaneous publication in Spain, Latin America and the United States is scheduled for March 24

he retires to a cabin on the outskirts of Buenos Aires before the advent of the pandemic. There he turned to the cultivation of plants and the study of botany and the great scientific expeditions of the eighteenth century. Through plants, he reconstructs the history of his family, his grandmother's dahlias, exile and uncertainty. “The natural landscape of the Southern Cone becomes a fundamental character, with its own rhythms, with the traces left by the men who tried to populate it”, points out the jury, who defines the work as “a luminous story about the daily life of a individual, but also about the collective tragedies that lie in wait for us”.

Endowed this year with 154,000 euros, the first edition of the Alfaguara prize took place in 1964, and was awarded until 1972. In 1998 it was relaunched with a clear pan-Hispanic vocation.

Since then, the list of winners has included the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez, the Colombians Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Pilar Quintana, or the Spaniard Ray Loriga who in 2022 has been part of the jury chaired by Fernando Aramburu and completed by the journalist and writer Olga Merino;

Marisol Schultz, director of the Guadalajara FIL;

the bookseller Paula Vázquez, and the editorial director of the literary division of Penguin Random House, Pilar Reyes, with voice but no vote.