The new André Malraux Prize was awarded for the first time in 2018, to honour a novel and an essay committed to "the service of the human condition" each year. The winners were announced on 23 November, anniversary of the death of French writer and intellectual André Malraux (1901-1976), a courageous human rights activist.
The first novel to win the André Malraux Prize has been El monarca de las sombras by Javier Cercas. The winner was chosen from nine finalists, including such notable authors as Zadie Smith, Philippe Lançon and Roberto Saviano.
The jury, made up of Karin Tuil, Laurence Debray, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Hélène Sallon, Matthieu Garrigou-Lagrange, Adrien Goetz and Alexandre Duval-Stalla, described the author as a "Homme de lettres qui a produit toute sa vie une réflexion poussée sur la littérature, CERCAS rappelle combien l’exploration des ombres reste une démarche nécessaire pour un intellectuel engagé. Cette démarche résonne avec l’engagement d’André Malraux dans la guerre d’Espagne."
Winners of the André Malraux Prize receive a trip around the world and the sum of 1933 Euros, a number commemorating the year La Condition Humaine was awarded the Goncourt Prize.
Javier Cercas (Ibahernando, Spain, 1962) served as a professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Illinois and later the University of Girona, a position he held for years while also writing fiction. In 2001, Cercas published Soldiers of Salamis. The book was a resounding success in Spain and abroad, winning praise from prestigious authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa, George Steiner, J.M. Coetzee and Susan Sontag. Cercas has been writing full-time ever since, and is one of Europe’s leading fiction writers. A very international author, his novels The Anatomy of a Moment, The Impostor and Outlaws have also received numerous European awards. Cercas’s writing is characterised by a daring exploration of the limits between reality and fiction, and a critical examination of recent history and its often inadvertent links to our present.
The André Malraux Prize for The Monarch of the Shadows by Javier Cercas was preceded by extraordinary success with the critics. Published by Actes Sud and translated by Aleksandar Grujicic, this novel has been hailed in France as one of the year’s great literary events. see: Javier Cercas, 'Monarque' in France