Writer Julio César Jiménez has won the 2015 Franz Kafka Prize for Novel, the award hosted by the Franz Kafka Society and the independent library Libri Prohibiti of the Czech Republic. The novel, Historia Clínica [which may be translated as Medical Records or Clinical History], also recently won the Premio Oriente de Novela 2015 in Cuba.

The platform that promotes news on the award, inCUBAdora, wrote that the jury reviewed 41 novels by writers living on the island and chose Jiménez’s Historia Clínica, “for his dry, uncomfortable, oppressive writing, where the characters live in a kind of interplay between monitoring (of White Brigades that circulate in the novel) and pleasure (providing, in this case, the drug).”

The review also highlights the writer’s “surfing” through “various styles, his various ways of telling something that exists between life and the clinic.”

Jiménez novel will be published in Spanish by Fra, in Prague, and 500 copies will be distributed in Cuba through the network of independent libraries on the island, according to contest guidelines.

For original article (in Spanish), see http://www.diariodecuba.com/cultura/1437153537_15769.html

Also see http://in-cubadora.org/2015/07/17/premio-franz-kafka-de-novela-2015-%C2%B7julio-cesar-jimenez%C2%B7/, http://in-cubadora.org/2013/01/10/convocatoria-concurso-franz-kafka-de-novelas/  and http://www.martinews.com/content/drawer-novels-where-censorship-is-ineffective/27974.html