The veteran and writer from Malaga, creator of the detective Toni Romano, receives the award for his "literary, political, and ethical commitment."

  "He has renewed the Spanish police novel, giving it a feminine and feminist perspective, thus becoming a pioneer in this realm," said the jury about the Pepe Carvalho Award’s winner of the XV edition, writer Juan Madrid (Malaga, 1947), as reported in a statement by the Institute of Culture of Barcelona.

After there being several foreign winners, such as James Ellroy (2018), Dennis Lehane (2017) and Donna Leon (2016), this prestigious recognition, born in homage to the memory of writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and his famous detective Pepe Carvalho and which Madrid will receive on February 6 as a part of the BCNegra festival, has been granted to a veteran from the old Spanish police force, for whom “a good crime novel gives a vision of reality, and proposes to take a glance at reality, and that has been really bothersome and continues to be bothersome today.

Crime novel is a dense, very strong kind of literature, and is only realistic, but many critics or gurus hate us and say that realism is journalism, not literature,” explained the writer in his last interview with El Cultural.

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