In accordance with our meta agreement to have topic challenges and a later meta agreement to have topic challenges lasting for two months and overlapping by one month, it is today time to announce the December 2025 – January 2026 topic challenge.
Based on the number of votes (+4 / -0), the topic challenge straddling 2025 and 2026 will be:
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
What's a topic challenge?
See the meta posts linked above, and also this main meta post. In short, during December and January you are invited to try to read at least one work by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and ask questions about it.
Participation is not obligatory in any sense, and questions on other works are more than welcome during December and January too; they just won't count as part of this topic challenge.
How can I take part?
By getting hold of some works by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and
- asking good questions about them or
- answering questions that have been posted as part of this challenge or
- writing a review on our Tumblr blog.
Questions about these works should be tagged with manuel-vazquez-montalban, spanish-language, and other tags as appropriate, e.g., poetry or the title of the relevant novel, etc.
We'll keep a list of all such questions in an answer to this meta post.
Clara Díaz Sánchez's presentation of the topic is as follows:
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was a Spanish author and journalist. In Spain and Latin America he is probably best known for his detective fiction starring the character he created, Pepe Carvalho, which is often credited with having introduced this genre of novel to Spanish literature. But there is far more to him than that.
Beyond his crime novels he wrote a substantial number of other works, wining the National Fiction Prize, the National Literature Prize, the Critics' Prize of the former Federal Republic of Germany, and the Recalmare Prize of Italy. His novels became more ambitious as he matured, beginning with The Pianist in 1985 covering changes in Barcelona from its fall to Franco to its recovery in the 1980s, and the monumental Autobiografía del general Franco (1992), in which an elderly writer is commissioned to write a pseudo-autobiography of Francisco Franco, which he uses to offer his own voice and version of the dictator's story. A short time later, he undertook another investigation of similar scope in Quinteto de Buenos Aires, a work in which he explored the secret mechanisms of Jorge Videla's Argentine regime, responsible for the "disappearance" of many opponents between 1976 and 1983.
Poetry is possibly his least-known literary facet, but he always regarded himself as a poet: “I was, I am and I will be a poet. I still don’t know, nor is it known, whether a good or a bad one, but I am a poet for the simple fact that I write poetry”. His first collection of poetry, Una educación sentimental, was written in the 1960s while he was imprisoned in Lerida. This book was be followed by six more, forming part of the cycle entitled Memoria y Deseo.
Finally I must mention his work as a journalist, for which he was considered "one of the most important witnesses to the end of Franco's regime and the Spanish transition [to democracy], as well as one of the most respected critical voices in the country." As well as essays and articles, he wrote a weekly column in the newspaper El País whose influence was such that following his death people would automatically wonder "What would Manolo think?” when faced with a new event.
Many of his works have been translated to English, and some are available at the Internet Archive. This website also includes many translated excerpts of his works.
A crime writer, a journalist and a poet — and an outspoken voice against Fascism. And yet there are so far zero questions about him and his work on the site.
What's next?
- Vote for the next topic challenge (January–February), or propose your own topic!
- Feel free to edit links into this post if you find some good online resources related to the works of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.
