These are the 2026 National Culture Awards

BarcelonaA sound art duo, a writer, a publishing house, a stage director, a musician, an actor, and a playwright are the winners of the 2026 National Culture Awards, the accolades that have been presented since 2009 by the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CoNCA). The winners are Cabosanroque, Pol Guasch, Jande Editorial, Àlex Ollé, Sílvia Pérez Cruz, Oriol Pla, and Victoria Szpunberg, as announced this Friday at an event held at the Pau Casals Auditorium in El Vendrell, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Pau Casals. The ceremony was presented by journalist Andrea Gumes and was attended by the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, the Minister of Culture, Sònia Hernández Almodóvar, and the President of the CoNCA, Margarida Troguet. Each award comes with 20,000 euros, and starting this year, there are no longer five winners, but seven.

The 7 2026 National Culture Awards

Cabosanroque

Sound architects

Laia Torrents (Barcelona, 1976) and Roger Aixut (Barcelona, 1975), the sound artists who form the Cabosanroque society, receive the National Culture Award for "the originality of their artistic practice, straddling music and visual installations". Temporada Alta Festival, Teatre de Salt, autumn 2009: dressed in blue overalls, Cabosanroque premiere the show Torn de nit. The protagonists of the show are not exactly them, but the machine that occupies the entire stage: a mechanical orchestra they built with parts from a production line of a biscuit factory in Granollers that closed due to the crisis. The expectations are met.

Torrents and Aixut trained as an industrial engineer and an architect, respectively, and have often said that they do not recycle objects but extract their soul. Their work is known for how they overflow the boundaries of the plastic arts, music, and performing arts, and they themselves have explored the limits of found objects and newly created ones, such as the newly created ceramic pieces they commissioned from the Cumella studio for the immersive sound and visual art installation based on Mercè Rodoreda's book Viatges i flors. As the CoNCA says, Torrents and Aixut "convert sound into sculptural matter within an architectural interpretation of space". "From Catalonia to the world, they establish dialogues with the Catalan literary and cultural heritage through rigorous research and the use of technological devices at the service of a poetic and, at the same time, political idea. Interdisciplinarity and collaboration with other musicians, writers, thinkers, and playwrights place them at the forefront of contemporary creation", summarizes the CoNCA. Through their collaborations, Cabosanroque can be considered creators who have acted as a hinge between the generation of Carles Santos, Jordi Savall, Pascal Comelade, Perejaume, Enric Casasses, and Frederic Amat and younger artists such as La Veronal and Marcos Morau, El Conde de Torrefiel, and Maria Arnal.

Pol Guasch

Limits explorer

The writer Pol Guasch (Tarragona, 1997) has been awarded “for the solidity of his incipient literary career, which spans from poetry to narrative,” and in his acceptance speech he defended public libraries and public education, which are fundamental to “not hand over the keys to the far right.” He also criticized “the political class that continues to destroy what is necessary and important” for the working class.

Guasch has published Relíquia (Anagrama) this year, which arrived after Napalm al cor (2021, Anagrama Novel Prize) and Ofert a les mans, el paradís crema (2024). The CoNCA highlights that “his works explore the limits of the body, language, queer experience, and the contemporary world to address classic themes such as love, desire, violence, and death with his own voice and style.” It also underscores his ability “to attract diverse audiences,” the translations of his works into sixteen languages, and the theatrical and cinematic versions that have been made of them. Napalm al cor was adapted for the stage at the Sala Beckett in 2023 and Relíquia will premiere at the Teatre Lliure in 2027.

In addition to his narrative work, Guasch has also published the poetry collections Tanta gana (Francesc Garriga Prize, 2018) and La part del foc (López-Picó Prize, 2021). “Writing can provide movements of vital transformation,” said Guasch in an interview about his books. “They helped me understand things about family, desire, abandonment, and sadness,” stressed the author, who is also a contributor to the ARA.

Jande Publishing

Identity, literature and diversity

One of the National Culture Awards has gone to Jande Editorial, a young publishing house specializing in fiction and non-fiction in Catalan and Spanish that was founded in 2025. Its founders, Aissata M’ballo Diao from Cervera and Diana Rahmouni Audenis from Mataró, have set out to discover new local racialized voices or those of migrant descent and to incorporate translations of authors who address identity. Among the names in their catalog are great contemporary literary voices such as Zadie Smith and debut authors like Fàtima Saheb. The jury awarded them “for the initiative of creating a space for Catalan literature with authors, experiences, and imaginaries often absent from the publishing ecosystem, which enriches Catalan culture”. At the event in El Vendrell, the two editors received the award as "a burden of hope and denunciation," a hope for a more diverse and broader literature that contributes to denouncing "the reactionary front" before which they do not intend to remain silent.

The editors have a social vocation and work to give space to references that appeal to identity diversity. “We seek not only to publish voices of migrant origin for the mere fact of being so, but also to take care of literary quality, offering authors the opportunity, financial compensation, support, and the framework of dignity and equality they deserve: so that they may finally access the cultural network of our country without it being an anecdotal or instrumentalized event,” the editors emphasize.

Àlex Ollé

Transgression with criteria

According to an unwritten law in the field of the performing arts, a theater director is consecrated in the world of opera. The challenge is of significant scale, because they must know how to bring works that have often become outdated to the present day and must know how to do so in large-scale productions. Yes, in opera the budgets are higher, but not everything goes. Among all the creative directors of La Fura dels Baus, Àlex Ollé (Barcelona, 1960) is the one who has gone the furthest in the field of opera. This is confirmed by the National Culture Award granted for a "particular creative vision that reinterprets scenic languages and traditional classical works with a transgressive contemporary approach", always with judgment. "I am a team player", he claimed in El Vendrell this Friday.

At the beginning of his operatic career with La Fura dels Baus, Ollé co-directed five operas with Carlus Padrissa, among which three of the collaborations with Jaume Plensa stand out, as well as the exceptional work of the architect Enric Miralles in the world of opera at DQ. Don Quixote in Barcelona, by José Luis Turina, premiered at the Liceu almost three months after the architect's premature death. Alone, Ollé has directed about thirty operas, often with the collaboration of set designer Alfons Flores. Some include memorable scenes, such as that of a giant female figure, the Claudia, who vomits the characters in The Great Macabre (2009-2011); the evocative sphere of the Death Star in Star Wars to Tristan und Isolde (2011); the overwhelming whirlwind of crucifixes on Norma (2016), and water as a receptacle for moral filth in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (2024).

Sílvia Pérez Cruz

Music in every breath

It is surprising that Sílvia Pérez Cruz (Palafrugell, 1983) had not yet received the country's highest cultural recognition. It is therefore worth celebrating that the CoNCA is awarding her for "musical excellence and vocal and interpretative quality, the result of rigorous and continuous training." There is training, yes, and a lot of hard work, but also a special instinct when she is on stage. Then her whole self, voice, body, and soul, are music. Sílvia Pérez Cruz breathes music, and her breath has perfumed artists like Rita Payés and Rosalía. As says Daniel Gómez Sánchez, doctor in musicology from the Complutense University of Madrid, Pérez Cruz "has created a school of vocal technique from which many Catalan artists draw." Oral_abisal, the album she released in 2026, is for the moment the latest step for a singer and composer who as readily takes on major challenges –the album Toda la vida, un dia (2023), for example– as she shares adventures with friends like Salvador Sobral, always with the rigor and freedom she has also shown on records such as Granada (2014) and Vestida de nit (2017). In her acceptance speech, Pérez Cruz championed "the collective in these very individualistic times," because "together many more things are moved." "Let us take care of culture and thus culture will take care of us," she added in a speech in which she also thanked the "financial aid" of the award, because it will help her to "rest in order to be able to continue working."

Oriol Pla

A true stage animal

In a single year, actor Oriol Pla (Barcelona, 1993) has received the National Culture Award for his career, the National Theater Award for his role in the show Gola, the International Emmy for the series Yo, adicto, and the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts together with his family for Travy. There are not enough awards in the world to highlight the acting quality of a true stage animal, whom the CoNCA recognizes precisely for "a talent and a physical expressiveness" that "is manifested in the great stage presence that characterizes him". "I want to share this award with the public space, with the squares where we can no longer play the guitar, with the popular athenaeums, the theaters, the libraries, the folk tales, the songs, the grassroots culture that nourishes us and lifts us up", he said upon receiving the award.

Forged in street theater at the hands of his parents, Quimet Pla (linked to the founding of Comediants) and Núria Solina (at Germans Poltrona), the actor has gathered the legacy of the historic Catalan circus companies (the Escarlatas, the Marduix, the Poltronas, who defined the 70s) and brought it into contemporaneity, as his friends from Baró d'Evel (the company of Tortell Poltrona's son), with whom he has worked on Falaise. "A friend of mine says that I am the Rodrigo Cuevas of the clown," he said a couple of weeks ago from San Sebastián. His resume is as extraordinary for what he has done as for what he has not done. Despite having worked in mainstream audiovisuals (Truman, Merlí, Dime quién soy), he has not opted for the path of the general public, but has instead defended auteur cinema projects (Agustí Villaronga, Elena Martin, Mar Coll, Jaime Rosales, Luis Miñarro, and the latest being Javier Giner) and has never abandoned creative theater.

Victoria Szpunberg

Critical and lucid

With her last two works, the playwright and director Victoria Szpunberg (Buenos Aires, 1973) has collected more than ten theatre awards, culminating now with the National Culture Award. L’imperatiu categòric (Ciutat de Barcelona award, the Critics' Award for best text, the National Prize for Dramatic Literature, and the 2025 Lletra d’Or award) and La tercera fuga (Max awards) condense the qualities of the author's theatre: "The ability to combine humor and irony in complex dramatic situations of contemporary life where philosophical ideas, expressed in everyday situations that have deeply connected with the public, are also mixed in", according to the CoNCA.

Szpunberg recalled that Bertolt Brecht had already warned in the 1930s that they were "bad times for poetry." And after summarizing a family biography marked by repression, exile, grandparents persecuted by Nazism, and parents harassed by the Argentine dictatorship, she reclaimed Catalonia as a land of welcome. "Long live Catalonia, impure," she said.

Daughter of Argentine exiles, with a poet father, Szpunberg cultivates a lucid and critical view of the world around us, from which complex and attractive works have emerged such as El pes d’un cos, the opera La gata perduda and Amor mundi. She has also written commissioned plays, such as Mal de coraçon and Permagel. Switching to writing in Catalan, the language of her host country, was the keystone of her literature, when she identified with a literary family and connected with her audience. She was the first author to write and direct a play in Catalan at the Sala Gran of the National Theatre.