One Million Euros for Everyday Monsters: Schweblin Wins the Inaugural Aena Prize
Did you know that the most valuable literary prize in Hispanic literature was just founded by an airport company?
Not a joke. The Premio Aena de Narrativa Hispanoamericana exists, it's worth one million euros — the same as the Premio Planeta, to give you a sense of the scale — and in its first edition it just landed in the hands of Samanta Schweblin for El buen mal, her short story collection published by Anagrama. Take that in. It's real.
I'm genuinely thrilled Schweblin won. Not because money validates literature — literature doesn't need validation from anyone, least of all a public company that runs airports — but because El buen mal is exactly the kind of book that deserves this level of reach. Schweblin has spent years doing something genuinely difficult: writing stories where horror doesn't announce itself, where catastrophe approaches in silence from the kitchen or the backyard, with characters "captivated by the glow of impending tragedy," as the jury put it. Not everyone can pull that off.
If you've never read Schweblin, here's a challenge. Open El buen mal to any page. Read the first paragraph. Now try to put it down. You can't, can you? That's what Schweblin does: she sets a trap so gently that by the time you notice, you're three stories deep.
The jury — chaired by Rosa Montero, with Leila Guerriero and Elmer Mendoza among the seven members — had to choose between five finalists of extraordinary stature. Enrique Vila-Matas was there with Canon de cámara oscura, Héctor Abad Faciolince with Ahora y en la hora, Nona Fernández with Marciano. That Schweblin won isn't surprising: if there's one voice that represents what matters in Hispanic literary fiction today — refusing to repeat boom-era formulas, unafraid of the strange, blending the ordinary with the unsettling until they become indistinguishable — it's hers.
Yes, it's unusual for a literary prize of this magnitude to be organized by an airport operator alongside the Fundación Gabo and the Cátedra Vargas Llosa. It's new and strange. But literature has survived stranger partnerships. If the result is that El buen mal reaches readers who wouldn't have found it otherwise, then welcome aboard, Aena.
Schweblin's stories don't need a runway to take off. But a launchpad doesn't hurt. If Distancia de rescate left you breathless — that impossible, coiled tension in such a short book — wait until you read Siete casas vacías. And if you've already been through Pájaros en la boca, you know exactly what I mean.
The question that lingers: do major prizes change a writer's trajectory? In Schweblin's case, probably not — she's already at the top. But maybe they change the trajectory of her readers.
