Sebastià Alzamora is awarded the National Poetry Prize

BarcelonaThe writer Sebastià Alzamora (Llucmajor, 1972) has been awarded the National Poetry Prize, which is granted by the Ministry of Culture and is endowed with 30,000 euros. The jury has chosen his work Sala Augusta followed by Llengua materna (Proa, 2025) for "its capacity to transition, with identical genius, from the impassioned language of historical denunciation to the delicacy of the domestic space". They also highlight that in this collection of poems, which is an evocation of Alzamora's memory, the author "weaves together with mastery collective history and family intimacy".

The book, Alzamora's seventh poetry collection, who debuted as an author in 1994 with Rafel —recently reissued by Lleonard Muntaner—, is made up of two extensive poems. In the first, Sala Augusta, Alzamora rescues images and scenes from the Spanish Civil War, such as that of a ship moored in the port of Palma, the Jaume I, which was turned by the Falangists into a prison for a few weeks in 1936. It is an exciting and harrowing narrative poem of free verse. "The author rescues from oblivion the horror of the Civil War from a cinema in the center of Palma that was a prison. His language, suspended between lyricism and rawness, makes the story flow through a tragic transit of deaths of innocents, invoking with urgency the pity and the necessity of remembrance", underlines the jury.

To Kill for the Fatherland

Alzamora recalls that he began writing the poem while working on the novel Reis del món (Proa, 2020): "It struck me to learn that the cinema I have gone to all my life had been a fascist prison. This impact set the poem in motion." Sala Augusta explains without sparing details some of the many crimes perpetrated during the civil war. Cruel executions, rapes, mass shootings... "They killed for the fatherland / they killed for Spain and for the faith," we read there. "Patriotism always makes me suspicious," asserts the author. "It happens to me as with religion and football: they are emotions that I can observe in others, but they do not ignite me at all. I believe a lot in that phrase by Samuel Johnson that says: 'Patriotism is often the last refuge of the scoundrel.' In the name of the fatherland, we have swallowed a great amount of shamelessness. And it still happens today."

The second poem in the book, Llengua materna, contrasts sharply with the first: Alzamora turns the death and ignominy of the first pages into light through a childhood memory related to his mother. "From a tender melancholy, the poet pays tribute to the figure of the mother and to a humble childhood marked by the women who sustained the home by working for the footwear industry," highlights the jury, adding that each verse of the book "bears the weight of a memory that establishes this work as an essential testimony of the human condition."

"The dead of the war are not only carried by us as a duty of collective memory, but they also directly interpellate our present. We live with politicians and citizens who think those crimes were well done. This fascinates and scares me," Alzamora explained last year, in an interview with ARA conducted shortly before the publication of the book, which before receiving the National Poetry Prize has already been recognized with awards such as the Critics' Prize (2025), the Cavall Verd (2026), and the Serra d'Or (2026). For the poet, Llengua materna ended up being a farewell poem to his mother, who died during the pandemic. "I wanted to explain the memory of going with my mother to deliver the work to the factory. She was a riveter: she sewed shoes. She would take the bundle where she carried the shoes in one hand and give me the other," the writer recounted at the time.

On previous occasions, the National Poetry Prize has recognized works in the Catalan language such as Tots els cavalls, by Antònia Vicens (2018), Casa de misericòrdia, by Joan Margarit (2008), El vendaval by Pere Gimferrer (1989) and Passeig d'aniversari, by Joan Vinyoli (1985).