Helen Oyeyemi and Mathias Enard will be at the third edition of ‘Escribiendo el Prado’

An initiative promoted by the Prado Museum, the LOEWE Foundation and Granta en español.

The most avant-garde literature once again crosses paths with classical painting in a timeless dialogue that materialises, once again, in the halls of one of Madrid‘s most emblematic museums. And Helen Oyeyemi and Mathias Énard will be the protagonists of this third edition of Escribiendo el Prado: a unique and ambitious project that makes the Prado Museum the epicentre of contemporary literary creation.

This project is not only about observing, but also about inhabiting the space, immersing oneself in centuries of pictorial history, confronting fiction with the matter of art itself.

After the international resonance of previous editions – which produced John M. Coetzee‘s El vigilante de sala and Chloe Aridjis‘s El nivel del aire – this year the literary collection expands with contributions from Olga Tokarczuk and John Banville.

Spring 2025 will see the arrival of Helen Oyeyemi, a Nigerian-born British author renowned for her lyrical, enigmatic and experimental style. She is an alchemist of the real and the fantastic, capable of transforming the everyday into myth, and the mythological into an intimate experience. Her work – translated into more than 14 languages – already engages in dialogue with the symbolic and the visual, so her time at the Prado promises a fusion that is as poetic as it is challenging.

In autumn it will be the turn of Mathias Énard, the French writer who won the Goncourt Prize with Brújula, a contemporary treatise on desire, the Orient and music as a universal language. A scholar, storyteller and explorer of the cultural margins, he will find in the museum’s rooms – and in its political and historical dimension – a space for his unmistakable voice.