The Planeta publishing house already has everything prepared to reveal tonight who will win the prestigious novel prize in its 75th edition, an award for which nine finalists were selected from a record 1,424 submitted manuscripts.
As is traditional, the names of the winner and the finalist will be announced during a literary dinner presided over by the kings of Spain, and which will also be attended, among others, by the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun; the president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, as well as a large number of cultural and media figures.
The event, scheduled to begin around 9:00 p.m., has this year moved to Pavilion 1 of the Montjuïc fairgrounds of Fira de Barcelona instead of the Museum Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), originally planned, due to capacity limits.
The Planeta is the best-endowed prize in the world for an unpublished novel, with 1,000,000 euros for the winning work and 200,000 euros for the finalist. Last year’s winner was Juan del Val for Vera, a Love Story and the finalist Ángela Banzas for When the Wind Speaks.
As a novelty in this edition, the silver trophy awarded to the winner will have a smaller replica for the finalist.
Nine unpublished finalist texts
Of the finalist works this 2026 edition, only two are authored by writers using no pseudonym: The Shadow of Isabel, a work about Isabel I of Castile authored by Pedro Regalado Rodríguez, and Letraherido, by Pepe M. Carrascosa. The rest of the finalist list, with pseudonyms and provisional titles, are Orange Dawn, by Tamsilt El Hayani; The Wanderers, by Martín Guerrero; Kintsugi or Three Broken Souls, by Hugalma de la Sierra; The Night of the Lanterns, by Mencía Salazar; Those Who Are Missing, by Luz Ventura; The Garden of Lennon, by Jorge Herrero; and The Naked Woman Goes Out at Eleven, by Bernardo Galeana. Initially there were ten finalists but one work was disqualified at the last moment after it was found not to be unpublished.
Paloma Sánchez Garnica and Javier Sierra are the new additions to the jury, alongside Carmen Posadas, Luz Gabás, Pere Gimferrer, Eva Giner and the Planeta publishing director, . Gabás detailed to the media on Wednesday the synopses of the finalist works and highlighted that all of them, regardless of themes or historical contexts, “coincide in the idea of the desire for peace, the need for healing, and the objective of achieving a full life.”
Also at the press conference, the president of the Planeta Group, José Creuheras, took pride hours before the 75th edition of the Planeta Prizes of the strong reception among readers of the winning works over the years. “The prize’s diffusion figures back us up; there are many opinions about the goodness or quality of a book, but what validates it is the reader, and the number of readers grows,” he said at a press conference held at the Palau de la Música Catalana. The group has tallied more than 47 million books sold across 74 editions of the prize, which amounts to more than 625,000 per edition. “I feel proud because one of the prize’s objectives is to discover readers and the prize achieves that,” Creuheras emphasized, who also noted that Planeta includes “great names of contemporary literature” in its catalog.