The Nadal Award was give last night at the Palace Hotel, Barcelona, but this year it will be making its way to the graying precincts of Oxford, ...

which is where the winning novel, Los crímenes de Alicia (Alice’s Crimes), unfolds. It is by Argentinian Guillermo Martinez (Bahia Blanca, 1962), PhD of mathematics and author of the bestseller The Oxford Murders (2003), of which the prize-winning book is the sequel. The Josep Pla Award for novels in the Catalan language, bestowed at the same event, went to Sarria, with the Barcelonese writer, Marc Artigau (35), whose book La vigília (The Vigil) is set there. This is a book in which the protagonist, a writer of radio dramas, puts together the biography of a mysterious, elderly lady. The drama of Los crímenes de Alicia takes place in Oxford in 1944, one year after its author’s most famous novel, and like the other book, it follows the literary traditions of Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe: the mystery novel with gothic trimmings. The protagonists here are the same: Professor Arthur Seldom and a young Argentinian scholarship student, based on Martinez himself, who studied at Oxford for two years. Both are fascinated by subjects like Wittgenstein-esque wordplay, quantum physics and Godel’s theorem. The Nadal Award has not been won by a Latin American writer since 1987.

Read more here:  La Vanguardia