The 2026 Minotaur Prize takes a turn towards dark fantasy in Ancient Egypt with ‘The Shadow of the Black Lotus’
This year the Prize celebrates a very special edition: twenty years since what has ended up becoming the most important award for fantasy literature in the Spanish language began to be awarded. This year the winner has been Africa Vázquez, who proposes with his novelto ‘The Shadow of the Black Lotus’ a dark fantasy story set in pharaonic Egypt that will go on sale next March 25. 216 manuscripts have competed for this edition of the award, mostly from Spain, in search of the 6,000 euro prize of which the award consists. The Minotaur is an award of international scope and this year proposals have come from countries throughout Latin America, especially Argentina and Mexico. Even so, the winner África Vázquez is from Zaragoza. She is not new to literary awards: her first novel already won, when she was only 17 years old, the Jordi Sierra i Fabra Prize. Since then he has published more than thirty books between Spain and Latin America, and has won various literary awards, including the Kelvin 505 at the Celsius 232 festival. In this work he has opted for travel to the remote past, with the story of a embalmer embarked on revenge which will take her to places as inhospitable as Waset, City of a Hundred Gates and capital of the Ta-Mri, with the intention of infiltrating the court of Pharaoh Nekht-en-sen. In ‘The Shadow of the Black Lotus’ you will discover that the secrets hidden in the heart of the Nile will not only shake the foundations of an empire. The earth rots, plagues come, and the secret behind it all seems to lie beyond the land of the living, in the depths of the Underworld. We are facing an epic and dark mythological fantasy story in a reinvented Egypt, where a priestess of the goddess Isis will plot revenge of ancient proportions. A dazzling journey The jury, made up of Sabino Cabeza (winner of the previous year), Laura Díaz (literary popularizer and writer), Fernando Bonete (university professor, author and prescriber), Judit Bertran (cultural journalist and editor of El Periódico) and Francesc Gascó (doctor in Paleontology and cultural popularizer) have praised Vázquez’s book. According to the jury, it offers a “millennial Egypt So carefully detailed you can even smell the embalmers’ ointment and the perfume of the lotuses of the Nile” Vázquez stated upon receiving the award that “in my novel I have poured all the passion I have felt for Ancient Egypt since my parents, at the age of thirteen, gave me the immense gift of taking me and my older sister to discover the wonders of the Nile. Later, when I had turned twenty-seven, I returned to sail through those ancient waters to receive another gift that would change my destiny.” The author assures that “perhaps that is why in ‘The Shadow of the Black Lotus’, a novel in which death and darkness are so present, there continues to be a light and a life that refuses to go out.” In Xataka | Conan has become an archetype and has survived for decades thanks to an unusual strategy: refusing to evolve
