In 1962, Mario Vargas Llosa won the Biblioteca Breve Prize with ‘La ciudad y los perros.’ Carmen Martín Gaite, with her novel ‘Ritmo lento,’ was a finalist.
In 2025, as we commemorate the centenary of the writer from Salamanca and the recent death of the Nobel Prize winner, we pause at this key moment in the history of Hispanic literature in the 20th century to try to understand how the canon of the contemporary Spanish novel was constructed.
The poet and publisher Carlos Barral created the Biblioteca Breve Prize in 1958. Four years later, a young and unknown Peruvian writer won the prize. His name was Mario Vargas Llosa. Although he had no more than a few essays and the occasional exercise in literary criticism behind him, his novel, short and corrosive of tradition, could not have been more and better suited to the budgets of the Biblioteca Breve Prize. ‘La ciudad y los perros’ was an ambitious and aggressive literary artifact, structured on the challenge of the fragment and marked with fire by the denunciation of institutional violence.
