Javier Cercas was awarded the “Literary Flame” Prize 2022, last 21st of December, in the framework of the Regional Festival of Books and Writers BOOK, in Podgorica (Montenegro).
The Literary Flame Award wants to recognize the writers whose literary work is woven with the feeling of modernity and the questioning of history and its consequences. The winners for the previous two years, when the prize was not awarded due to covid-19, were also announced, and the laureates are the Mexican writer of Palestinian origin Gabriel Zaid for 2020 and the Spanish author Irene Vallejo for 2021.
Receiving the award, Cercas emphasized that he is honored to be in the company of important writers, previous winners of “Flame”, such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Claudio Magris, Orhan Pamuk, Adam Zagajevski and Margaret Atwood.
"The writer writes the book together with the readers. The protagonist of literature is not the writer, but the reader. Readers who are attentive and able to discover in books even what the author himself missed, those are real readers". – said Javier Cercas, author of the novels Soldados de Salamina, El impostor, El monarca de las sombras.
The jury consisted of the Nobel laureate and co-founder of the “Literary Flame” prize Mario Vargas Llosa, the founder of the prize and director of the publishing house “Nova knjiga” Predrag Uljarević, and the professors Sonja Šundić Tomović, Siniša Jelušić and Aleksandar Jerkov.