Planeta Prize for Isabel Allende, the best-selling author of Hispanic literature

BarcelonaThe AI has received its first Planeta award tonight in Barcelona. But it is not, in this case, a machine capable of generating a novel that has deceived the jury, but the initials of the winning author, Isabel Allende, the best-selling living novelist in Hispanic literature, with more than 80 million copies sold. The 84-year-old Chilean author entered the 75th edition of one of the best-endowed literary awards – surpassed by very little by the Nobel Prize, which offered 1.1 million euros to the winner, Anne Carson– to culminate her extensive career and star in an editorial scandal: Isabel Allende is changing houses.

After being linked to Plaza & Janés (currently a Penguin Random imprint) since she debuted in 1982 with The House of the Spirits, one of the author's most beloved long-sellers, she is moving to Grup Planeta and returning to her most famous story with La hora antes del alba. "What a great emotion," Allende assured with a broken voice. "I had never entered a literary contest to avoid the humiliation of not finishing last. It was a challenge as great as getting married again at 80, as I have done." The runner-up author was the young Valencian screenwriter and novelist Sergio Hernández Carrasco, a face still little known among readers. The ceremony was held at pavilion 1 of Fira Barcelona, in Montjuïc, with the presence of the King and Queen of Spain, Felipe VI and Letizia, shortly after arriving from Ceuta, where the monarch defended the "indisputable" territorial integrity of the state.

Isabel Allende has celebrated the award for La hora antes del alba, the second part of The House of the Spirits, with these words: "My belly is full of seeds, which are stories, and from time to time one germinates. This happens when the topic is current, and now, with so many democracies threatened by nationalism and fascism, it seemed like the ideal moment to get to it." Allende was accompanied in the audience by house writers such as María Dueñas, Eduardo Mendoza, Sonsoles Onega, Boris Izaguirre, Espido Freire, and Alana S. Portero, as well as numerous media figures, especially those linked to Atresmedia, of which Planeta is the majority shareholder, such as Susanna Griso, Matías Prats, and Alberto Chicote.

The gala also featured the presence of a large representation of politicians who, despite the proximity of the Spanish elections, passed through the photocall without making statements, unlike Felipe VI, who did speak before all the attendees. "Planeta has contributed decisively to enriching our publishing landscape," said the monarch in Catalan before changing language and praising "the solidity of a project like the Planeta prize." "José Manuel Lara founded this award in 1952 to promote reading, and since then it has accompanied the transformation of our country through authors such as Mercedes Salisachs, Juan Marsé, and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

Next, the award dinner began with a beetroot, prawn, and feta cheese salad on a bed of pistachios. It continued with a dish of wild sea bass with shellfish sauce and ended with textures of dark chocolate and caramel. While the guests dined, the jury held, as every year, its final deliberations.

Allende leaves Plaza & Janés

A flagship author for Plaza & Janés for over four decades –currently owned by Penguin Random House, the great competitor of Grupo Planeta–, Isabel Allende has changed publishers shortly after the publication of her last two books, the collection of lectures La palabra mágica (2026) and the novel Mi nombre es Emilia del Valle (2025). Presented with the working title Los que faltan, the award-winning La hora antes del alba is a "historical fiction of overcoming about a family fighting to live in a convulsed country," the same Chile from which Allende had to flee in 1973, as a result of the coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew the then-president Salvador Allende, the author's second uncle.

The starting point is the return home of Alba, the young woman who has been imprisoned and tortured by the country's dictatorship and who is the youngest link of the Trueba saga, explored inThe House of the Spirits, which readers, and also television viewers, have very much in mind thanks to the miniseries based on the novel that Amazon Prime premiered this spring. "For me, writing is not an option, but an addiction –says Allende, who has lived in California for more than three decades–. Literature is magical. Each book is a journey into memory and the soul. During the silence of writing, sometimes spirits visit me, or perhaps they are muses. I feel them caressing the back of my neck. While writing, I transform into a medium. Writing is like meditating".

From magical realism to mourning the death of a daughter

Although she has now decided to revisit the characters and the story of La casa de los espíritus, a novel permeated by a magical realism heavily influenced by Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende has won over millions of readers thanks to her committed historical fiction, among which are De amor y de sombra (1984) and Inés del alma mía (2006) and also through autobiographical works such as Paula (1994), in which she addressed a long letter to her daughter shortly after she died, at the age of 29, as a consequence of a crisis of the rare genetic metabolic disease she suffered, porphyria, triggered by a change in the medication she was taking which left her in a coma.

Isabel Allende's popularity has overshadowed the finalist of this edition, the screenwriter and novelist Sergio Hernández Carrasco. Born in Valencia in 1994, with a degree in Hispanic philology and in screenwriting from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, Hernández combines the writing of novels such as La letra herida (A Contraluz, 2024) with scripts for graphic novels such as Backhome (2022) and Hysteria (2024). Hernández will receive the 200,000 euros that correspond to him as a Planeta finalist for La añoranza, a romantic thriller set in Barcelona in two timelines: in the first, set at the end of the 50s, a young woman falls in love with a French translator who mysteriously disappears from her life; in the second, which takes place 20 years later, the young woman discovers a report from the Francoist Social Brigades that links her former lover to a plot to assassinate the poet Antonio Machado. "When you try to find your own salvation by writing, a prize like the Planeta is fundamental, but a novel like this one, in addition, has transformed me," stated the Valencian author.