The five books that will compete for the one million euro prize of Aena's new literary award

BarcelonaThe new Aena prize for Latin American narrative has announced its five finalists: Now and at the hour, by the Colombian Héctor Abad Faciolince; Martian, by the Chilean Nona Fernández; The good bad, by the Argentine Samanta Schweblin; Camera obscura cannon, by Enrique Vila-Matas from Barcelona, ​​and The IllusionistsThe books by Marcos Giralt Torrente, from Madrid, will compete for the one million euro prize. The other finalists will each receive 30,000 euros. The announcement of the five finalist books was made this Wednesday at an event held at the La Mistral bookstore in Madrid, attended by the president of the jury, Rosa Montero; the secretary of the jury, Jesús García Calero; and two members of the team of professional readers who carried out the pre-selection: Nuria Zancot and Antonio Martínez Asensio.

Camera obscura cannon, the finalist work ofEnrique Vila-Matas, published by Seix Barral, is a literary artifact that revolves around the construction of a literary canon made from randomly chosen fragments from authors such as Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth and Carlo Emilio Gadda; The Illusionists, by Marcos Giralt Torrente, is a book by the author of Lifespan about his mother and his uncles, sons of the famous writer Gonzalo Torrente Ballester; Now and at this hour, Marked by the impact of the war in Ukraine, it represents the return to the memoir genre of Héctor Abad Faciolince, the author of the acclaimed The oblivion we will become, which Fernando Trueba adapted for film; The good bad It is a collection of short stories by Samanta Schweblin, who has been a three-time Booker Prize finalist, and MartianNona Fernández's novel, "El Mundo," spans the last decades of Chilean history, following the complex true story of guerrilla fighter Mauricio Hernández Norambuena. The winner of this first edition of the prize will be announced at a gala in Barcelona on April 8, before Sant Jordi's Day. The jury responsible for evaluating the works is composed of writers Pilar Adón, Luis Alberto de Cuenca, Jorge Fernández Díaz, José Carlos Lobo, Élmer Mendoza, Leila Guerriero, and Rosa Montero. Aena is the entity that manages the Spanish airport network, and 51% of its capital is controlled by the State. The Aena prize is awarded to published works, so any work published in 2025 in Spanish or in the co-official languages ​​of Spain was eligible, provided it has a Spanish translation. The prize money is greater than the Nobel Prize (which does not reach one million euros) and equals the highest-valued prize for unpublished work, the Planeta Prize.