• The Year of Discovery Interview

Luis López Carrasco, the diocumentalist who became known for the film The Year of the Discovery, is the winner of the Herralde Novel Prize, organized by the publishing house Anagrama and endowed with 25,000 euros. The White Desert, the award-winning work, is described by the jury as the story of "Nine strangers who flee in a balloon from bombings. They must decide which of them has to jump into the sea so that the rest can make it safely to a desert island and start a new civilization. Globe travelers are the only survivors of a world war that has wiped out the world as we know it. What is at stake, in reality, is not the future of the human species, but a temporary job as a salesman in a department store."

"All futuristic novels depict our present fears, but many do so pessimistically, trumpeting impending catastrophe and assuming defeat in advance. The White Desert imagines a very near future in which, without nostalgia, although in a beautiful melancholic tone, we have not forgotten who we were and who we are, friendship and family, love and tenderness, rage and rebellion, play and fantasy, creation and memory, of everything that could save us from the Apocalypse. Luis López Carrasco has written a novel that is formally audacious, funny, endearing, witty, stimulating, like our childhood dream of traveling to the moon," explains novelist Juan Pablo Villalobos, a member of the jury.

López Carrasco (Murcia, 1981) is the co-founder of the audiovisual collective Los Hijos. His work as a filmmaker has been screened at numerous international festivals and contemporary art centres in different Spanish cities, as well as in London, Manchester, Paris and New York. The Year of Discovery, premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and has won, among other awards, the Goya Awards for Best Documentary Film and Best Editing. He is co-author of the book The Arithmetic of Creation. Interviews with producers of contemporary Spanish cinema and in 2014 he published Europa, a short narrative framed in science fiction. He currently works as an assistant professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha.

The White Desert will hit bookstores on November 22. The Herralde Prize was deserted in 2022. In previous years, its winners were Andrés Barba, Cristina Morales, Mariana Enríquez, Luisgé Martín and Javier Pérez Andújar.

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