Paco Cerdà, a journalist and writer from Valencia, explains ‘Presentes’ (Alfaguara, 2024), the book that won him the Ministry of Culture's 2025 National Narrative Award, worth €30,000.
The jury chose the work for 'the stylistic mastery with which the author, with a lyricism as natural as it is striking, describes the construction of a myth through the narration of the transfer of the remains of José Antonio Primo de Rivera from Alicante to El Escorial'.
Presentes is written on two levels, says Roca. On the one hand, there is the grand architecture of the propaganda organized by the regime. Its counterpoint is the story of the pawns, those who sacrificed themselves for a cause, those who took their commitment to the point of tragedy.
