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Rabat – The Spanish best selling author nicknamed the Spanish Elena Ferrante, Carmen Mola, has been revealed to be three male authors working together under the female alias.
Known for a trilogy of successful thrillers published between 2019 and 2021, Carmen Mola was supposed to be the pen name of a provincial female Spanish university professor and writer who, like the Italian Elena Ferrante, had chosen to erect a sort of distanciation barrier between her life and that of her books.
But Carmen Mola turned out to be three male writers when the trio showed up to receive the prestigious, 1.2 million euros Premio Planeta de Novela prize for the historical thriller “The Beast.”
The Beast, a widely acclaimed page-turner, is a historical thriller set in a time of cholera epidemic in Madrid in 1834.
The author of the engrossing novel was instantly celebrated throughout the literary world, and the name Carmen Mola became synonymous with “ultra-violent Spanish crime thrillers” featuring police inspector Elena Blanco.
When the jury of the Planeta Awards announced Mola as the winner of the main prize during a ceremony held in Barcelona in the presence of Spain’s King Felipe VI, three people stepped up to the podium. To everyone’s surprise, none of them was a woman.
As they received the coveted prize, the three male writers behind the much-celebrated Carmen Mola pseudonym revealed their true identities as Jorge Diaz, Antonio Mercero, and Augustin Martinez.
All three writers are television script writers in their 40s and 50s who have worked on Spanish shows such as On Duty Pharmacy, Central Hospital, and No Heaven Without Breasts.
“Carmen Mola is not, unlike all the lies we’ve been telling, a university professor,” said Díaz on winning the prize. “We are three friends who one day four years ago decided to combine our talent to tell a story.”
Martínez suggested in an interview with Spain’s news agency EFE that the authors chose to write under one name because “collective work is not as valued in literature as in other arts.“
There has long been rampant doubt around the true gender of Carmen Mola, only no one suspected the gruesome, violent, and gripping detective novel trilogy could have been the collective work of 3 men.
In an interview, “Carmen Mola” had declared that she preferred to leave her family and professional relations out of her writing work, saying: “I didn’t want my colleagues, my friends, my sisters-in-law or my mother to know that it occurred to me to write about someone who kills a young woman by drilling holes in her skull to put worms in it, and to sit and watch how they eat the brain.”
Publisher Penguin Random House described Mola as “crime literature’s boldest and most enigmatic author.”
Mola’s writing was recommended by the Instituto de las Mujeres (Women’s Institute) as an essential feminist reading.
