ARA Comic Award: 10,000 euros for a short comic in Catalan

Barcelona10,000 euros is the prize that the winning comic strip of the seventh edition of the Premi ARA de Còmic will take home. L’ARA is calling for a new edition of the competition that promotes the creation of comic strips in Catalan with the aim of normalizing the presence of Catalan in the comic market, in which, despite the growth in recent years, the offer in Catalan continues to be much more minority than in other disciplines such as literature, theater or music. The initiative has the support of the Department of Linguistic Policy of the Generalitat, and the bases of the call can be consulted on the website Premicomic.ara.cat.

Participants in the competition can send their works until September 27, 2026. The comic strips must have a minimum of ten pages and a maximum of sixteen and must be works of non-fiction. A selection of the best comic strips received in this edition of the prize will be part of the anthology Vinyetari 7, which Editorial Finestres will publish during the first quarter of 2027. The authors of each work selected in Vinyetari 7 will receive 300 euros from ARA and 200 euros from Editorial Finestres, and will retain all rights to the works.

One thousand pages of comics in Catalan in six years

In the six previous editions of the Premi ARA de Còmic, more than 400 works have been received, attesting to the talent of emerging comics in Catalonia. Of these, 56 works have already reached bookstores in the first five volumes of Vinyetari. And when the sixth Vinyetari goes on sale – on June 3rd – there will already be 68 stories published thanks to the Premi ARA: nearly a thousand pages of comics in Catalan that are available to readers thanks to the authors' trust in the competition and the commitment of collaborating institutions and publishers.

With the Premi ARA de Còmic, Berta Cusó, for example, was born as an author, who has just and published her second graphic novel, L’extraordinària història del Circ Cric. Also , who after winning the 3rd edition of the competition debuted with the acclaimed Trufa, or the duo formed by , winners of the fifth edition, who had published their first work together in the first volume of Vinyetari.Furthermore, many works presented at the Premi ARA have had a life beyond the competition. Pep Brocal, who won the first edition of the competition with Caritat del Río and,

; Ferran Vidal also published a graphic novel, Fuerza, on the same theme as the short comic he was a finalist with in 2020. And Maribel Carod will publish this year in France the long version of , the comic he was a finalist with in 2023.In its six editions, the list of winners of the Premi ARA has distinguished authors with careers and prestige such as Brocal, Carosia, Luis Pérez Ortiz, Jordi Carrión, Oriol Malet, John Carlin, and Susanna Martin, but it has also discovered debut or practically unknown authors such as Glàfira Smith, Berta Cusó, Lluc Silvestre, or J. Lobo Hispano López, who at only 22 years old .