Spanish actress and author Elvira Mínguez has won the 2026 Primavera Novel Award (Premio Primavera de Novela) for her second novel, La educación del monstruo (The Education of the Monster), a haunting and deeply human story that explores how fear and memory can shape a life forever, which will be published in the original Spanish on April 15th 2026 by Espasa/Planeta.
The jury highlighted the literary value of the novel, emphasizing its ability to address a period rarely explored in Spanish fiction—the wave of emigration to Germany in the 1960s—and, from there, to build a narrative shaped by family secrets, suspicion, and the transmission of fear across generations. The novel follows Mathilde, a devoted and overprotective mother of a five-year-old boy. An involuntary memory becomes the trigger that leads her to search for the reason behind this overprotection, which she increasingly understands to be harmful both to her son and to herself.
This is also the story of Matilde’s mother, Águeda, a young woman who emigrated to Germany with her family in 1963 and lived under the same roof as a man and his teenage son, a quiet boy who learned the language of humiliation far too early.
In this search, Matilde returns to her childhood, to Valladolid (Spain) in the 1970s, and to her school, run by Sister Olvido. The city is gripped by a series of kidnappings and assaults on young girls that spread panic, while an ominous silence settles over families.
The Education of the Monster is a novel about how violence is created, how fear is passed down from generation to generation, and how we all take part, sometimes unknowingly, in the making of a predator.
Elvira Mínguez (Valladolid, 1965) is a Spanish actress, screenwriter and author. She started acting in 1994, playing Lourdes in the film Días Contados, a performance which earned her first Goya (Spanish Film Academy) Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She has won awards like the Golden Egret at the Miami Hispanic Film Festival in 1999, the Silver Biznaga at the Málaga Film Festival twice, and the Goya Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2006 for the film Tapas. However, she is also known for her role as Flora in the three films adapting Dolores Redondo’s Baztan Trilogy (now on Netflix worldwide as The Invisible Guardian, The Legacy of the Bones and Offering to the Storm). In international cinema, she has been directed by John Malkovich, Steven Soderbergh, Paul McGuigan or Asghar Farhadi, among others. She regularly collaborates with many Spanish media outlets and the School of Screenwriting in Madrid. In 2023 she published her debut novel, La sombra de la tierra (Earth’s Shadow). In 2026, she won the 2026 Primavera Novel Award (Premio Primavera de Novela) for her second novel, La educación del monstruo (The Education of the Monster).
For more information about Elvira Mínguez's work, please contact Anna Soler-Pont (anna@pontas-agency.com).