The Chilean author Isabel Allende has won the 75th edition of the Planeta Prize for novels, endowed with one million euros, with the work The Hour Before Dawn, which continues the plot of The House of the Spirits, featuring Clara’s granddaughter Alba as the lead character.
The Planeta winner, who until now published with the other major publishing house, Penguin Random House, has received the award from the hands of the kings. Allende had entered under the pseudonym Luz Ventura and had concealed the title of her novel under the fictitious Those Who Are Missing.
“This novel closes the universe of The House of the Spirits,” declared the most-read Spanish-language writer upon receiving the prize. The 84-year-old author affirmed that, since she published The House of the Spirits in 1982, she had received numerous messages from readers who wanted to know what happened to Alba after the ending, but it is now when she felt that the moment to resume it had arrived. “When I see so many democracies threatened by extreme authoritarianism and even fascism, I feel the fear again that forced me to leave the country after the 1973 coup,” she stated.
The author confessed that she had never before entered a competition, “to avoid the humiliation of ending up at the back of the line,” and that if she has now dared to participate it is because she believes that at her age “there is very little to lose.” The plot of this new story in the The House of the Spirits universe is set immediately after the end of its most famous title. Other novels connected to that story published previously were Daughter of Fortune and Portrait in Sepia and My Name is Emilia del Valle.
Sergio Hernández, Finalist
The finalist novel for the Planeta Prize was Nostalgia, by the Valencian writer and screenwriter Sergio Hernández, in which he narrates the story of a woman in 1959 Barcelona who falls in love with a French translator who mysteriously disappears from her life and who will end up being connected with the Francoist Social Brigades and an alleged plan to kill Antonio Machado.
Hernández (Valencia, 1994), writer, screenwriter and philologist, published his first novel, The Wounded Letter (Contraluz) in 2024. He also wrote the short story collection The Last Spring Song (OléLibros, 2019) and the comics Backhome (Planeta Cómic, 2020), El Diari de Laia (Drassana, 2021) and Hysteria (Planeta Cómic, 2023).
With a bookseller father, Hernández has said he knows firsthand what this prize means: “When one begins to write, one never imagines what it is like to be here,” he said, and he also affirmed that writing this book transformed him and made him rediscover his country’s history. He also thanked the prize, worth 200,000 euros, to his mentors, among whom he named, amid applause, Almudena Grandes, “for her way of handling memory,” Javier Cercas, Carmen Laforet and Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
The jury for this anniversary edition consisted of Paloma Sánchez Garnica, Javier Sierra, Carmen Posadas, Luz Gabás, Pere Gimferrer, Eva Giner and . The award ceremony, presided over by the kings, brought together 1,300 guests at the Fira Barcelona, including also the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun; the Minister of Industry and Tourism, Jordi Hereu; the President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Salvador Illa, and the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, as well as a large number of personalities from the world of culture and media.