César Aira, Inés Garland, and Ariel Magnus made it onto the shortlist for a $5 million prize.

The path leading to the Medifé Filba Foundation Award has just taken the final step, leading to a book published in the last year receiving the five million pesos prize . This morning, the five titles that make up the shortlist were announced, from which the jury composed of María Moreno, Alejandra Kamiya and Alan Pauls will select the winner: César Aira, Inés Garland, Ariel Magnus, Matías Aldaz and Carmen M. Cáceres are the candidates.

"The Medifé Filba Foundation Award seeks to give new visibility to books that came out a year ago, bringing them back into the discussion and back onto the nightstands of readers," say Filba director Amalia Sanz and Catalina Labarca, one of the festival's content managers.

The five finalist novels are Something Nobody Did , by Matías Aldaz, published by El Gran Pesque; Continuity by Emma Z. , by Ariel Magnus , published by Interzona Editora; Diary of a Move, by Inés Garland , published by Alfaguara; In Thought by César Aira , published by Penguin Random House; and The Fiction of Saving , by Carmen M. Cáceres, published by Editorial Fiordo.

"This list brings together novels that narrate fragments of the disappearance of a town as happens in Something Nobody Did or the transformation of a body and a life as in Diary of a Move . Works that work with a more experimental and "transtextual" line as happens in The Continuity of Emma Z and novels that, through humor, narrate the childhood of a child in a town through memories as happens in In Thought or that portray the urban life of a middle-class provincial family at the beginning of the 21st century as happens in The Fiction of Savings ", point out the prize organizers.

In November, the winning title will be announced, determined by the jury, and will receive a prize of 5,000,000 pesos, as well as a statuette designed especially for the award.

The merits of each book, which will be analyzed by María Moreno, Alejandra Kamiya, and Alan Pauls, were reviewed by the Medifé Filba Foundation Award's organizers.

• Something Nobody Did by Matías Aldaz is a novel that narrates, in fragments, the vestiges of a people who, in abandonment, disappear. With a special work with the language (which mixes Guaraní, Portuguese, and German), the narrator moves between his memories, the echoes of a place that no longer exists, and the voices of those who are no longer with us. “I saw a lot of all the blood I've ever seen in my life in Don Yrasema's sawmill. I saw how it went from being liquid to thickening, becoming viscous like a river. On the other hand, the blood of the dead is very different; some say that stain, wherever it may be, never comes out,” he says somewhere in the novel.

Matías Aldaz was born in Federación in 1976. He holds a law degree from the University of Buenos Aires. He is the author of the short story collections Esas nubes (Simurg, 2009), La lluvia cae en todas partes (Colección Mulita, 2014), the novels Bajante (Colección Mulita, 2017), La vida de un hámster (Kintsugi Editora, 2021), Algo que nadie hizo (El Gran Pez, La Novela del Verano 2024 Award), and the poetry collection Antes de cerrar la puerta (Editorial Deacá, 2019). Together with Laura Escudero Tobler, he wrote the novel La ciudad perfecta (Norma, 2017).

• Continuity of Emma Z. is an experimental novel in which Ariel Magnus reinterprets, or rather, extends, Borges's short story "Emma Z.." In it, the author imagines the life of the protagonist, now married and with a child, interweaving the plot with authors such as Julio Cortázar and Juan Carlos Onetti. "To the natural pride of any mother was added, in Emma's case, the pride of not having a father. That one was her son and no one else's. The other part of the equation had been diluted by a memory that confused and repudiated her, until it almost disappeared completely," he says somewhere in the novel.

Ariel Magnus was born in Buenos Aires in 1975. He published Sandra (2005), La abuela (2006, translated into German), Un chino en bicicleta (2007, winner of the "La otra orilla" International Novel Prize, translated into seven languages ​​and reissued in 2016), Muñecas (2008, winner of the "Juan de Castellanos" International Short Novel Prize and adapted for the stage), El desafortunado (2020, finalist for the "Biblioteca Breve" Prize and translated into six languages). Continuidad de Emma Z is his latest novel. As a literary translator, he has translated around forty books from German, English, and Portuguese into Spanish. Since 2020, he has lived in Germany, where he works as a literary translator.

• In Inés Garland's Diary of a Move , the protagonist moves house and, through this metaphor, narrates the death of her father, the life her daughter begins when she moves out on her own, and the process she is going through: menopause . "A hormonal treatment to 'be who I was.' I don't want to be who I was! I don't even want to be. I'd rather learn how to be," she says somewhere in the novel.

Inés Garland writes, works as a translator, and coordinates literary workshops. She has published novels and short story collections for adults, including With the Sword of My Mouth (2019), A Truer Life (2017), and A Perfect Queen (2008). She has also published novels and short story collections for young adults and children, such as The Leader of the Pack (2014) and Rock, Paper, Scissors (2009), among others.

• In El Pensamiento by César Aira, the author evokes his childhood in a small town near Coronel Pringles . Through a handful of memories that come together to recount the life of a boy, his mother, his father, and his tutor, a mystery plot is constructed: a train engine traveling from Rosario to Bahía Blanca disappears in the middle of the road, near El Pensamiento. “It is well known that the interests of childhood, even if they are, as they usually are, driven by the most intense passion, are fleeting and are soon replaced by others no less passionate. It must be so; they must pass, in order to leave something behind. The permanent, like obsession or fear, which I also knew, left me nothing because they remain with me,” he says somewhere in the novel.

César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province, in 1949. He is a translator, essayist, and writer. In fiction, he has devoted himself almost exclusively to the novel. *The Argentine Light* and *The Pink Dress* in the 1980s; *How I Became a Nun* and *The Test* in the 1990s; * An Episode in the Life of the Traveling Painter * and *Parmenides* in the 1900s; *I Was a Married Woman * and *Artforum* in the 2010s; and *Diverse Ideas * and *In Thought* in the 2020s are some of his nearly seventy novels, published, republished, and translated by publishers around the world.

• Carmen Cáceres's fiction about savings features the middle class and its complex relationship with money. Set in 2001, the story begins with a distinctly Argentine scene : the narrator tapes bundles of dollars to her body to prevent them from being stolen after withdrawing them from the family safe deposit box. "The Argentine people's ability to recover from these types of improvised and unusual policies fuels the myth of Argentines as a creative and resilient race. Ultimately, facing a crisis every twenty years is also a form of stability," she says somewhere in the novel.

Carmen M. Cáceres was born in Posadas in 1981. She is a writer, translator, and illustrator, and the author of the novels Una verdad improvisada (An Improvised Truth , Pre-Textos, 2016) and La ficción de ahorro (Fiordo, 2024; Gatopardo España, 2025), and the essays Un año con los ojos cerrados (co-authored with Andrés Barba; Papeles Mínimos, 2021) and Al borde de la boca. Diez intuitiones en torno al mate (Fiordo, 2022). She has translated authors such as Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, the Mitford sisters, and Barack Obama from English. As an illustrator, she trained in Madrid and New York and works with mixed techniques of collage on canvas and analog photography. She has illustrated covers for various literary publishers, podcasts, and magazines.