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Vladimir Sorokin enters the inner workings of the Prado to write an unpublished work
Vladimir Sorokin is already working inside the Museo del Prado. The Russian writer arrived in Madrid on 1 September to take part in Escribir el Prado, a residency that will allow him to explore not only the collection open to the public, but also restoration workshops, laboratories, storerooms and other professional areas of the museum while he prepares a new story inspired by his stay.
The experience goes far beyond visiting the galleries after closing time. Sorokin will be able to speak directly with curators and researchers and learn about the day-to-day workings of an institution that visitors normally see only from its galleries. The aim is for that immersion to end up transformed into fiction.
The result will be an unpublished text related to the Prado, to be published in a bilingual Spanish and English edition within the Escribir el Prado collection. The programme is promoted by the museum and Fundación LOEWE, with the collaboration of Granta en español, and seeks precisely to create new stories from the encounter between literature and the visual arts.
Sorokin, born in Bykovo in 1955, is one of the central figures of Russian postmodernism. Before establishing himself as a writer, he worked as an artist and illustrator and was linked to Moscow Conceptualism and the underground cultural scene of the late Soviet period. In Spanish, titles such as El día del opríchnik and, recently, El Kremlin de azúcar have been published.
Madrid residents will also have an opportunity to get close to the process directly. On Thursday 17 September at 18:30, Sorokin will take part in the Prado auditorium in the event “Blizzard at the Prado: a poetics of survival”. Admission will be free until capacity is reached, and tickets can be collected that same day at box office 1 from 18:00.
Sorokin is not the first writer to whom the Prado has temporarily handed the keys to its internal workings. The programme began in 2023 with Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee and has since hosted authors such as Chloe Aridjis, Olga Tokarczuk, John Banville, Helen Oyeyemi, Mathias Énard and Leïla Slimani. Sorokin is one of the two names chosen for the 2026 edition alongside Slimani.
The particular feature of these residencies lies precisely in what an ordinary visitor cannot do: establish sustained contact with conservators, researchers and the museum’s workspaces, and have weeks to return to the same paintings instead of viewing them in a few hours.
The first part of that experience will remain out of public view. The 17 September event will be the opportunity to discover what Sorokin is finding behind the Prado’s galleries; the definitive result will come later, when the museum publishes the story arising from his residency.