David Toscana is awarded the Alfaguara Novel Prize for “a dark and powerful fable”

The writer David Toscana (Monterrey, 1961) said that although blind people are perceived as defeated, in reality they are “adventurers. You see them crossing streets. We close our eyes, take three steps and we already feel afraid. They have an everyday heroism.” The author won with his The blind army the Alfaguara Novel Prize 2026, announced yesterday.

In a virtual conference from Madrid, the narrator added: “Since in my novel I am talking about armies, wars and so on, I wanted to sublimate it so that something of the spirit and human dignity would be there: the man who, without seeing, has many capabilities. Although the blindness of these soldiers seems affiliated with tragedy, there is a rebellion against this destiny.”

The distinguished text will hit bookstores in March, according to Penguin Random House. It addresses, for the first time in literature, the fact that, after defeating the Bulgarians at the Battle of Klyuch in 1014, Basil II, emperor of Byzantium, ordered the blinding of 15,000 of the defeated soldiers.

The jury described the text as “a dark and powerful fable, moving away from the conventional historical narrative to offer a symbolic, almost mythical reading about war, power and resistance. Narrated in the first person by Kozaro, the scribe, the novel takes on an oral and poetic tone that mixes testimony, legend and black humor. A great epic of the defeated.”

Toscana rejected the idea of ​​making a historical novel in this title, but rather “someone leaves me something tasty and I dedicate myself to cooking it a little more, adding spices, some tortillas and presenting a dish that could be tastier than the one that History left us.”

Xavier Villaurrita, also a winner, said that in his novel he reflects on the fact that his characters “no longer have eyes, but what do they ‘see’? The idea that they can perceive many things and not like the Princeling “which says that ‘what is essential is invisible to the eyes’, but in truth an army without eyes can perceive, see, imagine, do.”

He noted that his protagonist Kozaro, the scribe, has an important part in his narrative, because when someone asks him if he can continue reading, “he has to think if reading is something that depends on the eyes or not.

“He writes in the Cyrillic alphabet in a Bulgaria where the alphabet is still young, the people are not very literate and no stories, chronicles, poetry or, of course, novels are written. The texts we have from that time, the year 1014 and back, are liturgical texts, some of laws or inventories. Nothing of history or poetry survives from that time. As a novelist they leave me all the room to imagine and that is what I did in this novel.”

Fill the gaps

David Toscana said that there was only one chronicler of Bulgaria who stated that the tsar saw the return of his “blind army and died of shock. There are no more chronicles, there is no more history, not even any archeology that can tell us about what happened.”

He said that the Polish historian Paweł Jasienica proposed that this topic was material “for novelists, because all the elements of Greek tragedy are put there. I took the bait and said to myself: ‘we are going to fill this gap in history, where we are not told what happened to these blind men and we are going to fill it with literature, which moves away from the conventional story because when they have the opportunity to read it they will realize that there is a good dose of fable.’

Novelists, the author added, “usually have many historian’s passions, but they should never be beaten. They have to be sure of what story is being told as a novel and not fill it with every thing they found out. I am going to tell everything that harmoniously has to do with a novel. And then I have to be a novelist and not a historian.”

The narrator avoided recreating a realistic story; Instead, he dedicated himself to turning that tragic scene “into beauty, into something solid for the human spirit. The blind are not defeated, they are characters who have their individuality, something to say and do and a strong dignity, even a vocation for heroism.”

In Bulgaria there are statues and works of art about this event, but “it had not been seen in literature. One thousand 12 years after the event they had not written the novel and a Mexican came to write it. Literature is something universal. As a Mexican I have the right to get into worlds, into pasts, even to relate in Spanish something that happened in another language. The novelist has the right to imagination that the historian does not have.”

To The army of the blindfocuses on Kozaru’s voice, since it cannot be the story of 15 thousand protagonists. “I take some that have certain peculiarities and I think that the individual is what is important in the novel. You always have to focus on the individual, who is the one who has the ability to see things in his own way, to have his own dignity and this weight that defeats him or sublimates him.”

In his most recent novel, he included something that he had not done before: “we, the first plural dog. There are many experiences that are lived in a group. ‘We blind people did this thing, we went to that, we went through this’. This would be the most choral of all the voices.”

He is also the author of The weight of living on earth He recognized himself as part of the “ancients who admired what man was capable of, of building and destroying. He does wonderful things. Where I have found this wonder is, above all, in the humanities and the arts. That is why I dedicate myself to this. We writers would not have stories if there were no criminals, wars, infidelities and betrayals. We build our stories with the bad.”