Elena Quiroga

1950 Nadal Prize

The novel that launched one of the most singular voices of postwar Spanish fiction.

In a remote Galician manor house, a pazo, a servant gives birth in the stables and disappears at dawn, leaving her newborn daughter behind. The child, Marcela, is taken in by the landowner, Álvaro de Castro — a cultivated, introspective man deeply rooted in his land and lineage. Years later, she will become his wife and the lady of the house she grew in. 

Set in rural Galicia, North Wind draws on the legacy of nineteenth-century realism — recalling Galdós and Pardo Bazán — while already anticipating Quiroga’s shift toward psychological modernism.

Beneath the rural setting lies a subtle exploration of class hierarchy, gender inequality, and inner conflict. The novel resists strict naturalism: its tension does not stem solely from social determinism, but from the characters’ private anguish and emotional contradictions.

With this debut, Elena Quiroga became the second woman ever to win the Nadal Prize and began the literary trajectory that would lead her to the Royal Spanish Academy.

“Her literature, avant-garde, ground-breaking, imbued with the imagination of William Faulkner, the twin sister of Virginia Woolf’s creativity […].” Vanity Fair