The novel Journalist’s ‘Operation Kazan’ Vicente Valles has won the Spring Award 2022endowed with 100,000 euros, according to the jury’s decision made public this Friday, which has highlighted the intriguing plot of this espionage story that spans almost the entire 20th century and what we have been in the 21st.
The winning novel of the XXVI edition of the Primavera Prize, convened by the Espasa publishing house and Ámbito Cultural de El Corte Inglés, is a story “full of intrigue that, from a very original perspective, poses a fictional matter that could very well be the most absolute reality“, according to the jury.
The jury for the Primavera de Novela Award, chaired by Carme Riera and made up of Antonio Soler, Gervasio Posadas, Fernando Rodríguez Lafuente and Ana Rosa Semprún (secretary with vote), decided yesterday, Thursday, this award unanimously, at a meeting held in Madrid.
And after hearing the jury’s decision at a press conference, Vallés (Madrid, 1963) He has hoped that readers will be entertained, have a good time with his novel and perhaps learn “something I didn’t know”because “there is a lot of real history in this fictional story”.
It is a choral novel that began as a journalistic essay, as are his two previous works, as explained by Vallés, who has said that he has found himself very well with the freedom that fiction has given, although reality often surpasses it .
“The plot is not in a position to compete with realitywhich exceeds fiction, because it would not have occurred to me to tell the espionage story of a political party today”, he said in reference to the events experienced this Thursday in the Popular Party.
In ‘Operation Kazan’ the journalist builds an espionage plot that spans most of the 20th century and what we have been in the 21st century and in which the KGB, the CIA and the CNI are involved.
Its starting point is the birth in New York in 1892 of a boy for whom the Soviet intelligence services devise the most audacious espionage plan ever imagined. Years later, Lavrenti Beria, the bloodthirsty Bolshevik police chief, will present this plan to Stalin, who will take over the operation and turn it into a personal and extremely secret mission.
The novel runs from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the American elections of the 21st century, going through the horrors of World War II, the Normandy landings, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of regimes communists in the 1990s and the current Russian interference in Western democracies.
‘Operation Kazan’, which will hit bookstores on March 23, follows in the footsteps of his two previous booksin such a way that it could be the third part of a trilogy, even if they are not novels, he said.
His writing has taken him longer than he thought, three years, because the pandemic meant additional journalistic work for him.
Vicente Vallés has been dedicated to journalism for more than three decades. He directs and presents the nightly news program for Antena 3, and has previously been responsible for news programs on Telemadrid, Televisión Española and Telecinco.
He is also a political analyst in press and radio. He has received several awards, including the Salvador de Madariaga, the International Press Club, the Antena de Oro, the Iris Award from the Television Academy, the Ondas Award, the Foreign Press Correspondents Association Award, and the Francisco Cerecedo Award from the Association of European Journalists.
He is the author of the books ‘Trump and the fall of the Clinton empire’, in which he analyzes the result of the 2016 American elections and ‘The Trail of the Dead Russians’ (2019).
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The Primavera de Novela Award was created in 1997 with the aim of supporting literary creation and contributing to the maximum dissemination of the novel as a form of artistic expression of our time. In addition to the financial award to the winner, the winning work will be published exclusively by the Espasa publishing house. The winner last year was the Spaniard Pedro Simón for “Los ingratos”.
A total of 1,428 originals have been submitted to this call for the award, of which 694 came from Spain, followed by Argentina and Mexico, with 223 and 110 originals, respectively.