Skip to main content
web marketing

Guillermo Saccomanno's The Wind Will Burn wins the 2025 Alfaguara Novel Prize

  • Portrait of Guillermo Saccomanno, winner of the 2025 Alfaguara Prize, courtesy of Alfaguara.

The Alfaguara Novel Prize, considered one of the most important literary awards given to an unpublished work written in Spanish, in its 28th edition has been awarded to the Argentine writer Guillermo Saccomanno for his work Arderá el viento.

The prize is worth 175,000 dollars (approximately 170,000 euros), a sculpture by Martín Chirino and simultaneous publication throughout the Spanish-speaking world. The novel will be available in bookstores on March 20.

This year's call for entries received 725 manuscripts, of which 322 were submitted from Spain, 93 from Argentina, 110 from Mexico, 89 from Colombia, 38 from the United States, 27 from Chile, 25 from Peru and 21 from Uruguay.

Jury of Excellence

The jury, chaired by Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, was composed of authors Leila Guerriero and Manuel Jabois; film director and screenwriter Paula Ortiz; writer and owner of the La Mistral bookstore (Madrid), Andrea Stefanoni, and the editorial director of Alfaguara, Pilar Reyes (with voice but no vote).

Juan Gabriel Vásquez commented on the winning work: “It is a short novel, but in its brevity it manages a rich number of evocations, almost subgenres. A lot happens in very few pages. It is a novel of such speed that it blows your mind. We are constantly seeing what is happening in a very intense way. It is a novel that is a call for certain conversations about violence in our societies and tensions that are individual in the novel and that are part, very soon, of a kind of metaphor for the extension of the public”

For her part, Leira Guerriero, addressing the Argentine author, spoke thus of Arderá el viento: “It contains the best of your universe, the best of your voice, the best of your sparse, rocky manner, that rough, almost brandy-like voice, that one can feel in your prose both in your journalistic prose and in fiction and I felt that it was a book in which your narrative power was displayed in a superb way, even though I read it, as I said, without knowing that it was from you”

Saccomanno, in a press conference

In a virtual meeting with the international press, Guillermo Saccomanno thanked the recognition and shared reflections on his work.

“Yes, it can be read perfectly as a metaphor for reality, for sure, because a town as a whole, focusing on different characters, each one of them is a model of behaviour. My novel is not realistic in the sense that I did not start from stories of the town; I took some figures and invented a story for them. It is also a bedroom novel, it is a crime novel in the sense that there are murders, yes, it is a crime novel and it is a police novel.”

Prolific and multi-award winning author

Saccomanno was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1948, and for years he devoted himself to advertising and screenwriting, collaborating with Spanish, English, Italian and North American publishers. In 1979 he published the book of poems Partida de caza, and in 1984 he made his debut in narrative with the novel Prohibido escupir sangre, which was followed by Situación de peligroso (1986; Club de los XIII Prize);Roberto y Eva (1989); The Good Pain (1999; National Prize for Literature); the trilogy on political violence made up of the books The Tongue of the Malón (2003), Argentine Love (2004) and 77 (2008; Dashiell Hammett Prize), which was a great success with critics and the public; The Kid (2006); The Office Worker (2010; Biblioteca Breve Prize); A Teacher (2011; Rodolfo Walsh Prize); Cámara Gesell (2012; Dashiell Hammett Prize); Terrible Accident of the Soul (2014); Inverted Love (2015) and Those Who Come from the Night (2018), both in collaboration with Fernanda García Lao; I Am the Plague (2020), and Blackbird (2024). Some of his stories have been adapted for film.