Juan Jacinto Muñoz Rengel’s “El gran imaginador” wins Novel of the Year at the Celsius Festival
El gran imaginador by Juan Jacinto Muñoz Rengel, recipient of a 2014 Leonardo Grant for Literary Creation, has won the Novel of the Year prize at the Celsius Festival. Over its 450 plus pages, the book tells the story of Nikolaos Popoulos (Athens, 16th century). Popoulos’ great dream was to the write the best book of all time, but fate decided he would find himself instead on the course of an epic journey.
22 January, 2018
“The prize kind of gives meaning to the novel. If a book ends up having no impact, you feel lost, but this is an encouragement to go on writing. This award is important because my novel is a kind of hybrid,” the author explains. “The fact that it recognizes a range of genres has helped bring me to the attention of a wider readership.”
An added pleasure for Rengel was that “the prize lets me give something back to the BBVA Foundation, because they believed in me when the book was just a project.”
One year on from the publication of El gran imaginador, Rengel admits that despite trying to write in two registers, with the goal of reaching both a literary and a more popular readership, the task was far from easy, since the ordinary reader might feel put off by the content. “I think fans of the historical novel expected something different, but the book won them over because its adventure side gives it a playfulness it might otherwise lack. But it also has an educational side,” he affirms.
The author believes that the award underscores the importance of young readers, whom he feels the novel has connected with. Proof of this assertion is that the festival public was mainly of this age group. “At book signings, at the festival’s opening session, in every event, you could see lots of young people, including teenagers,” he relates.
Muñoz Rengel has already started on his next project. Although his initial idea was to rest after writing El gran imaginador, other plans have intervened. He is currently at the revision stage of a philosophical essay and writing a short novel which he describes as “unsettling.”