The Ministry of Culture and Sport has awarded the writer for her latest work, Los pacientes del doctor García (The Patients of Dr. Garcia).

Almudena Grandes (Madrid, 1960) says that the news of the National Narrative Award caught her off guard this morning while she was at work finishing page eighty of her new novel, La madre de Frankenstein (The Mother of Frankenstein), which is a continuation of the series Episodios de una Guerra Interminable (Episodes of an Endless War), set during the Franco regime. And this recognition, in fact, was awarded for Los pacientes del doctor García, which is included in that same project. When she started all this, she says she was told that it was crazy, that she was going to get tired of it. "Now that idea doesn’t seem so weird," she replies with satisfaction. “They have told me lots of things: ‘Don’t you have anything else to write about?’" she recalls now, before insisting that everything about the Francoist regime "is being told because we have been told so little, and the same thing has been repeated so many times.”

Read more here: ABC - CULTURA