Mexican author David Toscana has won the Alfaguara Novel Prize (one of the Spanish-speaking world's most prestigious literary awards) for El ejército ciego (The Blind Army), a novel rooted in a documented 11th-century atrocity: after defeating the Bulgarian army at the Battle of Klyuch in 1014, Byzantine Emperor Basil II — known as Basil the Bulgar-Slayer — ordered the blinding of 15,000 Bulgarian soldiers, leaving one in every hundred with one eye to lead the rest home. The shock of seeing his devastated army reportedly killed the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel within days. Toscana's novel, told with the tone of a folk legend, imagines what happened next — how blinded soldiers such as a ceramicist, a carpenter, and a scribe attempted to rebuild their lives — and uses the premise to reflect on the nature of literature itself, arguing that reading is an act of understanding rather than of sight.