Nadal Suau, literary critic, writer, and columnist for Publishers Weekly en Español, has been the winner of the 51st Anagrama Essay Prize for the work ‘Curar la piel,’ an essay about tattoos.

Born in Palma in 1980, Josep Maria Nadal Suau maintains in the award-winning text that there was a time when tattoos were associated with characters from marginal environments, "sailors, convicts or freaks." But "today the tattoo has become universal and has lost this stigma." Nadal Suau maintains: “Tattooing is a party. For us who mark ourselves, getting a tattoo is the greatest party imaginable, a mixture of a solemn vow and a childish trick.”

One hundred and thirteen originals from fifteen countries were submitted to this latest edition of the Anagrama de Ensayo. The award is worth ten thousand euros. The jury, made up of Jordi Gracia, Pau Luque, Daniel Rico, Remedios Zafra, and the editors Silva Sesé and Isabel Obiols, has recognized Nadal Suau for his risk, interest, and unorthodoxy. "In this essay the body is the book, and the tattoo is the entry point to the narrative of culture and the present, from the biographical point of view, from the luminary of different duels where the needles are endured and enjoyed," says Remedios Zafra. «Nadal Suau's essay calls us to talk about life through tattoos. The complex parent-child relationships, love, declassification, the meaning of the subversive, literature. It is as if the author had tattooed an immense dragon on Michele Montaigne's back," says Pau Luque, another member of the jury.

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