Portico of Galician Literature

Biography

Miguel Sande has worked as a journalist on the Lugo coastline for Galicia’s best-known newspaper, La Voz de Galicia. He is an award-winning poet in the Galician language with titles like Philosophers Don’t Toast with Hemlock Anymore (Afundación Award, 2019) and Toast and Despair (Johán Carballeira Award, 2022). Among his fiction titles, If One Day This Dead Woman won the Repsol Prize for Short Fiction in 2006, while The Candidate received the prestigious García Barros Award in 2016. The Negotiator, a book based on the longest kidnapping in the history of the Basque separatist group ETA, was shortlisted for the Xerais Prize for Novels in 2021. He is also an accomplished playwright, winning the Rafael Dieste Award in 1998 for his play Nobody Cried for Us.

Synopsis

The Negotiator (152 pages) is a work of fiction, but is based on the longest kidnapping in the history of the Basque separatist group ETA, that of prison officer José Antonio Ortega Lara, who was held in captivity for 532 days between 1996 and 1997. The novel draws on the account of the professional negotiator who took part in meetings with the separatist group in Algiers and is told from four different perspectives. The first perspective is that of the negotiator himself. He is in Algiers, negotiating with the kidnappers, whose demands habitually include the relocation of prisoners and open prison regime.

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