Ariel Magnus receives the IV Ciudad de Estepona Novel Prize for ‘Mentir la verdad’.

The award, promoted by the Estepona City Council and the Manuel Alcántara Foundation, recognizes a work that addresses the manipulation of information during Nazism and several decades later.

The novel ‘Mentir la verdad’, by Argentinean writer Ariel Magnus, has been awarded the IV Premio de Novela Ciudad de Estepona, a 25,000-euro prize organized by the Manuel Alcantara Foundation and the Estepona City Council, with the collaboration of Editorial Pre-Textos.

The City of Estepona Novel Prize, promoted since its inception by the mayor of Estepona, José María García Urbano, has established itself as a key project for the promotion of literature. The alderman has valued its contribution to placing the city on the map of the first level culture.

The award was presented this Thursday in the auditorium of the Mirador del Carmen Center of the Costa del Sol town in a ceremony attended by the councilman of Heritage, Daniel Garcia, the president of the Foundation, Antonio Pedraza, the publisher Manuel Borras, and the writer and journalist Guillermo Busutil.

After the event, a colloquium was held between Ariel Magnus and Guillermo Busutil, in which different aspects of the winning novel were developed. The day was closed with a performance by the singer Javier Ojeda.

The novel

Mentir la verdad’ recreates the figure of Heinrich Jürges, a character who, after his passage through Nazism in Europe, landed in South America, where he participated in different movements and came to generate, through false documents, the well-known plot of Patagonia, which led to the prohibition of the activities of Hitler’s party in Argentina.

Mixing real and fictitious sources, Ariel Magnus builds a story that spans four decades and two continents, in which political and cultural figures such as Perón, Borges, Kafka or Paul Zech appear, and which explores the chiaroscuro of the press in turbulent times and the miseries of those who work with sensitive information.

The president of the jury of this edition, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, defined the work as “a journey to the origins of political lies”, adding that “the manipulation of information was invented by the Nazis”.

The rest of the jury, which evaluated nearly 800 works submitted, was made up of prominent members of the Spanish literary and journalistic community: novelists Laura Ferrero and David Uclés; Rafael Arias, head of the Letras Corsarias bookstore; Silvia Pratdesaba, editor of Pre-Textos; and Guillermo Busutil, head of activities at the Manuel Alcántara Foundation.

Ariel Magnus

Ariel Magnus was born into a German-Jewish family in Buenos Aires in 1975. He studied at a German school in that city and later studied Romance Languages and Philosophy in Germany. Back in Argentina, she published ‘Sandra’ (2005), ‘La abuela’ (2006, translated into German and French), ‘Un chino en bicicleta’ (2007, International Novel Prize ‘La otra orilla’, translated into eight languages and republished in 2016), ‘Muñecas’ (2008, International Short Novel Award ‘Juan de Castellanos’, taken to the theater and republished in 2023), ‘Cartas a mi vecina de arriba’ (2009), ‘Ganar es de perdedores y otros cuentos de fútbol’ (2010), ‘Doble crimen’ (2010), ‘La cuadratura de la redondez’ (2011), ‘La 31 (a precarious novel)’ (2012), ‘A Luján (a pilgrim novel)’ (2013), ‘Cazaviejas’ (2014), ‘Comobray’ (2015), ‘Seré breve (cien cuentos escuetos)’ (2016), ‘El que mueve las piezas (una novela bélica)’ (2017, translated into five languages), ‘El aborto (una novela ilegal)’ (2018), ‘The Unlucky One’ (2020, finalist for the ‘Biblioteca Breve’ Award and translated into six languages), ‘The Vasectomy (an inconceivable novel)’ (2021), ‘Double Life’ (2022), ‘Uriel and Baruch’ (2022), ‘The Feast of a Faun’ (2023), ‘Continuity of Emma Z.’ (2024), ‘Einstein in a quilombo’ (2025) and ‘Heavy’ (2025). Since 2020 he has been living in Germany, where he works as a literary translator.

Previous editions

Since its creation, the City of Estepona Novel Prize has attracted the attention of writers from all over the world. In its first edition (2021), it gathered more than 300 originals from countries such as Germany, France, Egypt, Canada, USA, Guatemala and Mexico, resulting in the winning novel ‘Tumbas de agua’, by Mexican author Miguel Tapia. In its second edition, participation doubled, exceeding 600 originals, and the winning work was ‘Buitrera’, by Manuel Moya. In 2023, the novel ‘El sabor de mi madre’, by Marina Perezagua, won the award among nearly 700 entries from different parts of Spain, Europe and Latin America.

In this edition, the Estepona City Novel Prize has received a total of 771 works from Spain, Europe and Latin America, consolidating its international projection and its role as a platform for the promotion of new voices of contemporary narrative.

For more information: 616 72 60 55- 607 798 483 – comunicacion@manuelalcantara.org