All prizes Argentina
Argentina · Since 1998 · For books in Spanish
Awarded each October or November in Buenos Aires by the newspaper Clarín to an unpublished novel in Spanish, submitted under a pseudonym by writers from any country, which Clarín and Alfaguara then publish.
The Argentine newspaper Clarín founded the prize in 1998; its first winner was Pedro Mairal. Writers from any country may enter an unpublished novel in Spanish under a pseudonym, and entries have run from about 400 to more than 1,400 a year. A preselection jury and professional readers choose a group of finalists, usually around ten, and a jury of honour of three writers picks the winner from them, sometimes adding special mentions. Its jurors have included José Saramago, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Augusto Roa Bastos and Rosa Montero. The winner is announced at a ceremony in Buenos Aires, receives a cash prize and a statuette, and the novel is published under the Clarín-Alfaguara imprint, sometimes with a new title.
Clarín 2025 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“English Notebook”
Novel · 192 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Carlos, a solitary Spaniard who cares for elderly people in London, starts keeping a notebook after a plague of huge flies invades his rented room.
Clarín 2024 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“If You Felt the Greater Structures Beneath Your Feet”
Novel · Speculative, Historical
AI-generated summary:A living organism older than humanity spreads beneath the Earth and surfaces as a strange plant bound to the human mind, witnessed by narrators in 1504, 1888, 1945 and a distant future.
Clarín 2023 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“To Bewitch a Hunter”
Novel · 409 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Julia, long unsure of her origins, is approached in the street by an old woman who claims to be her grandmother and begins, over drinks in a bar, to tell her the true story of her family.
Clarín 2022 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Invisible Desert”
Miguel Gaya · 70 when first published
Novel · 376 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:On the turbulent nineteenth-century frontier between Argentina's settlers and its Indigenous peoples, a set of nameless characters, from a one-handed Indian with an iron glove to a colonel and his wife, cross paths.
Clarín 2021 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Where Silence Echoes”
Agustina Caride · 52 when first published
Novel · 265 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:During the Covid lockdown, Leonor, nearly eighty, sees a for-sale sign on the flat above hers, home of Elvira, a dear friend she stopped speaking to over politics.
Clarín 2020 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Leaning Over the Well”
Sancho Arabehety · 55 when first published
Novel · 361 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Two narrators alternate: a man recalling a childhood in the Córdoba hills and two sisters who came to stay, and a corporate auditor who repeats obsessive rituals in hotel rooms and dreams of a wartime German childhood.
Clarín 2019 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Black Is the Sorrow of the World”
Novel · 265 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In Buenos Aires in 1729, Félix de Dios, a young Black man raised in a white Spanish household, loses his protection when his father dies and must prove he is free, not a slave.
Clarín 2018 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“You Are for Me”
José Niemetz · 56 when first published
Novel · 280 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Estela, an obese woman with a huge sexual appetite and a past of abuse and abandonment, runs the family plant nursery, where she turns into a merciless serial killer.
Clarín 2017 · Winner
Cadáver exquisito
Agustina Bazterrica · 43 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:After a virus deadly to humans spreads through the animals and they are wiped out, eating human flesh has become legal, and society is split between those who eat and those who are eaten.
Clarín 2016 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Canary”
Carlos Bernatek · 61 when first published
Novel · 285 pages · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:Back in Buenos Aires after twenty years of drifting in Brazil, Javier Parra meets at work a haunted man nicknamed the Canary, who as a conscript under the dictatorship was posted to the ESMA.
Clarín 2015 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“What Is Known About Patricia Lukastic?”
Manuel Soriano · 38 when first published
Novel · 332 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Patricia Lukastic, an Argentine tennis prodigy of the 1990s coached by her father, vanished from view after retiring at twenty-one; the novel follows her rise and their suffocating bond.
Clarín 2014 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Rebellion of the Useless Trades”
Daniel Ferreira · 33 when first published
Novel · 310 pages · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:Around Colombia's rigged elections of 1970, an old peasant woman leads homeless workers in seizing land in a small town, while a drunken landowner squanders his fortune and a local journalist reports.
Clarín 2013 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Beasts Outside”
Fabián Martínez Siccardi · 49 when first published
Novel · 125 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:A young agronomist travels to a remote estancia for his research and finds a bedridden old owner, a sullen housekeeper with her small son, and a hostile landscape in which something cruel seems to be at work.
Clarín 2012 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Survivors”
Fernando Monacelli · 46 when first published
Novel · 275 pages · War, Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:When melting ice in Antarctica releases a raft carrying the frozen body of a conscript from the General Belgrano, a diary found on him gives his mother hope of a living grandchild.
Clarín 2011 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Imitator of God”
Luis Lozano · 51 when first published
Novel · 155 pages
AI-generated summary:Back in his home town of Providencia after a long absence, the enigmatic Vieytes wants every inhabitant to perform a play in roles unlike their own, and asks an old school friend to keep a diary of it.
Clarín 2010 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Other Beach”
Gustavo Nielsen · 48 when first published
Novel · 179 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Two married couples watch the holiday slides of strangers found in suitcases bought secondhand; afterwards Antonio, who no longer loves his wife, becomes obsessed with a young woman he photographs in the street.
Clarín 2009 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Lighter Than Air”
Federico Jeanmaire · 52 when first published
Novel · 237 pages
AI-generated summary:A fourteen-year-old burglar ends up locked in the bathroom of the ninety-three-year-old woman he meant to rob, and she spends four days telling him her life through the door.
Clarín 2008 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“To Lose”
Raquel Robles · 37 when first published
Novel · 252 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A mother whose five-year-old son has died goes through her grief and the slow work of recovering from it.
Clarín 2007 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Lost Place”
Novel · 221 pages · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1977, in a half-empty village in Jujuy, a policeman arrives looking for the partner of an alleged subversive and demands the letters she wrote to her friend Marita, who refuses to give them up.
Clarín 2006 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Minor Art”
Betina González · 34 when first published
Novel · 181 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Long after her estranged father, a mediocre sculptor, has died, Claudia spots a piece of his in the house of a woman he evidently slept with, and resolves to piece together the life he hid from his family.
Clarín 2005 · Winner
Las viudas de los jueves
Claudia Piñeiro · 45 when first published
Novel · 274 pages · Crime, Satire
AI-generated summary:In a gated community in Argentina, a group of men meets every Thursday night without their wives, who call themselves the Thursday widows, until one night the routine breaks.
Clarín 2004 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Father's Place”
Novel · 163 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:After her father dies, a woman looks back on him: a railway crossing keeper who came from Italy after the war and settled in a suburb south of Buenos Aires.
Clarín 2003 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Lost in the Moment”
Patricia Suárez · 34 when first published
Novel · 228 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Lena Polzicoff, granddaughter of Russian immigrants to a small town in Santa Fe, flees to Canada after putting ground glass into a jar of mayonnaise at the New York restaurant where she worked.
Clarín 2002 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Ungrateful Women”
Novel · 238 pages · Love, Historical
AI-generated summary:Loves won and lost unfold among the lodgers of a Buenos Aires boarding house called Las Ingratas in the first years of the twentieth century.
Clarín 2001 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Memories of the Still River”
Cristina Feijóo · 57 when first published
Novel · 292 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Rita and Juan, once militants in 1970s Argentina, are trying to build new lives and forget, until a comrade they believed among the disappeared turns up again.
Clarín 2000 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“It Hides Behind the Eyes”
Pablo Toledo · 25 when first published
Novel · 206 pages
AI-generated summary:A young photographer stumbles through a run of misfortunes in the company of an odd circle of people drawn into his life.