“The jury decided to award” the prize to “one hundred guinea pigs by the Peruvian author Gustavo Rodríguez”, announced the president of the jury, the Argentine writer Claudia Piñeiro.
It is “a tragicomic novel set in Lima today, which reflects one of the great conflicts of our time: we are increasingly long-lived societies and increasingly hostile to the elderly,” Piñeiro explained.
The 54-year-old author, born in Lima, thanked the award, in a video intervention, and assured that he wrote the work “so that we begin to talk about death more naturally, with more freshness and even with humor.”
Rodríguez’s novel, presented under a pseudonym, was chosen from among more than 700 manuscripts to win this award, one of the most important and best rewarded in the Spanish language.
Rodríguez is a Peruvian writer and communicator who has published the novels Achilles’ fury, your mother’s laugh (Herralde Award finalist), or The week has seven women.
A contributor to the Lima newspaper El Comercio and the Etiqueta Negra magazine, he runs a communication consultancy and is editor of the opinion portal Jugo de Caigua.