David Toscana, Mexican writer, wins the 2026 Alfaguara Prize

By majority vote, the jury of the 29th Alfaguara Novel Prize has declared the novel El ejército ciego (The Blind Army) the winner. A symbolic, almost mythical, reading about war, power, and resistance.

The jury was chaired by Mexican writer Jorge Volpi and composed of writers Agustina Bazterrica and Brenda Navarro, and cultural programmer Camila Enrich. The journalist and director of the program Página Dos on RTVE's La 2 channel, Óscar López, and the editorial director of Alfaguara, Pilar Reyes (with voice but no vote), commented: “Starting from an 11th-century historical event in which Basil II, Emperor of Byzantium, ordered the blinding of 15,000 Bulgarian soldiers, the author creates a dark and powerful fable, moving away from conventional historical narrative to offer a symbolic, almost mythical, reading of war, power, and resistance. Narrated in the first person by Kozaro, the Scribe, the novel acquires an oral and poetic tone that blends testimony, legend, and dark humor. A great epic of the vanquished.”

A total of 1,140 manuscripts participated in this edition, of which 524 were submitted from Spain, 171 from Argentina, 169 from Mexico, 109 from Colombia, 62 from the United States, 49 from Chile, and 34 from Peru. 22 from Uruguay. The Alfaguara Novel Prize is endowed with $175,000 (approximately €147,000), a sculpture by Martín Chirino, and simultaneous publication throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

The Blind Army

Year 1014. After defeating the Bulgarians at the Battle of Klyuch, the Byzantine Emperor Basil II orders the eyes of the fifteen thousand soldiers of the enemy army to be gouged out, leaving one in every hundred men blind in one eye to guide the blind men back home. For weeks, a column of ragged soldiers gropes its way along the long road to the Bulgarian capital, where they are received by Tsar Samuel, who, faced with the terrible sight of his humiliated men, collapses from grief. He is succeeded on the throne by his son Gavril, heir to a threatened empire that he must defend by using his cunning to raise the morale of the people after the latest defeat. Beyond the walls, enemies lurk, while in the city streets, soldiers try to resume their lives. Some hide and remain silent; others discover that their hands can replace sight; some fear appearing monstrous; and still others make a good profit selling precious ceramic beads that resemble eyes. And among them all is a blind scribe who, unable to copy what has already been written, pours onto parchment a story that grows within him: that of the fifteen thousand blind men and their unexpected revenge.

History, inventiveness, and poetry converge in this magnificent tableau inspired by medieval chronicles and one of the cruelest episodes of the Byzantine wars. The blind army speaks to us, with delightful irony and wit, about the narratives of the past and how easily the testimony of the vanquished disappears into oblivion.

This novel will be available in bookstores in Spain on March 26th.

The author

David Toscana (Monterrey, Mexico, 1961) has published the short story collections Lontananza (1997) and Brindis por un fracaso (2006), and the novels Las bicicletas (1992), Estación Tula (1995), Santa María del Circo (1998), Duelo por Miguel Pruneda (2002), El último lector (2005), El ejército iluminado (2006), Los puentes de Königsberg (2009), La ciudad que el diablo se llevó (2012), Evangelia (2016), Olegaroy (2017), and El peso de vivir en la tierra (2022). 

He participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and the Berliner Künstlerprogramm.

David Toscana has been awarded the José María Arguedas, Antonin Artaud, Colima, José Fuentes Mares, Xavier Villaurrutia, Elena Poniatowska, Mazatlán, and Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Novel Prizes. His work has been translated into seventeen languages.