Few novels published this year start with a plot premise as curious, risky, and fun as The Last Trace, by Maria Reva (Kherson, 1989), which Periscopi is now publishing in Catalan, translated by Míriam Cano. It begins as the story of biologist Ieva's obsession with breeding endangered snails. It continues with the day-to-day life of Romeo Meets Yulia, the mail-order bride company where Ieva works to fund her research into gastropod mollusks. Through two sisters the protagonist comes into contact with, Nastia and Solomia, she agrees to kidnap a group of single men to denounce the misogyny of the business and, in the process, discover who is behind the mysterious disappearance of her mother. In the midst of the adventure, moreover, the novel implodes and transforms into a completely different book.

The "unmistakable and original voice", the "creative freedom", the "constant dialogue with Latin American works of the literature of strangeness" and the "opening of paths to new generations of narrators" are four of the main reasons that Ernest Urtasun, Spanish Minister of Culture and Sports, gave this Tuesday evening on behalf of the jury to grant Cristina Fernández Cubas the Cervantes Prize 2026, endowed with 125,000 euros and intended for works in the Spanish language. Born in Arenys de Mar in 1945 and settled in Barcelona for decades, Fernández Cubas has been one of the pioneering narrators in including supernatural and inexplicable elements in her literary world, which began to unfold from 1980 with the publication of an emblematic collection of stories, Mi hermana Elba, at Tusquets, where she has presented the entirety of her work.

For decades, Antònia Carré-Pons (Terrassa, 1960) combined secondary school teaching with classes at the Open University of Catalonia, the writing of novels such as Jo també vull ser funcionària (Proa, 2010) and the editing of books such as Espill, by Jaume Roig (Quaderns Crema, 2006). "When I took early retirement, it was the moment to make my dream come true, which was to set up a publishing house," she recalls from the Casa Usher bookshop, which hosted the celebration of the fifth anniversary of Cal Carré, the project that started in October 2021 with Dos relats, written by Virginia and Leonard Woolf. "Since then we have published fifty titles –she explains–. I feel great pride in the work done during this time because it connects with my parents and grandparents, who had owned the butcher shop in Terrassa that the publisher pays tribute to in its name. If they had great respect for their customers, Cal Carré has it for the reading public: we never sell them a pig in a poke".

A few days ago, two well-known authors, suspicious of the creative abilities of generative artificial intelligence, put it to the test and the result was not what they expected. "We asked it to write a one-paragraph story in a baroque style with the sole premise that it had to feature a dog walker, and the story was coherent and not bad at all, but then we asked it if it could rewrite it with our own particularities as authors, without giving it any other clue, and it did it even better," comments Irene Pujadas, winner of the latest Finestres award with La intrusa (L'Altra, 2025) and one of the participants in this experiment. The other was Mariana Enriquez. "We weren't satisfied with what the AI achieved and we wanted to know how it had decided what choices to make in each case –continues Pujadas–. It replied that, in Mariana's case, it had set out to write a story with a touch of mystery that was not found in the characters, but rather related to the spaces where it took place, as she usually does in her fiction. In my case, connecting it to my literary world, the dogs in the story were taking an emotional management course and everything ended up having an absurd bureaucratic touch".

The jury of the National Prize for Spanish Letters recognized this Tuesday the career of the prolific and influential writer Enrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, 1948) "because he masterfully embodies the core principles of postmodern fiction through a particular style where the borders between reality and fabulation blur and intermingle with absolute fluidity, with the ability to build a literary universe that dialogues with tradition while reinventing it.".

For every award received Sala Augusta followed by Mother Tongue, the latest book by Sebastià Alzamora (Llucmajor, 1972), the Majorcan author has not stopped wondering about the reasons that had made it possible. "I think about it constantly, but I cannot quite explain it to myself," he admits with a smile, surrounded by the jury of the Lletra d'Or prize, one of the most veteran in the Catalan literary sector. It is the fifth recognition for a published work that Sala Augusta has received since Edicions Proa released it in May 2025. First came the Critics' Prize from the Spanish Association of Literary Critics. A few months later, it won the Josep Maria Llompart Prize, awarded by the Association of Catalan Language Writers of the Balearic Islands. It was followed by the Crítica Serra d'Or Prize for poetry and, weeks before the Lletra d'Or, was awarded the National Poetry Prize "for his ability to move, with identical brilliance, from the impassioned language of historical denunciation to the delicacy of the domestic space".

A year and a half ago, Mariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) left Argentina and settled in Launceston, on the north of the island of Tasmania. Before leaving the country where she had been born, raised, worked, and, finally, triumphed with novels like Nuestra parte de noche (Anagrama, 2019), Enriquez needed to take stock of the authors who had marked her throughout nearly four decades of obsessive reading. "While I was finishing that book, Archipiélago [Ampersand, 2025], my library was traveling by ship from Buenos Aires, and it could have been lost forever –she recalls now from Barcelona, with a new essay just published, Conversación con la oscuridad (Páginas de Espuma, 2026)–. For a few days, I fantasized about the idea of the shipwreck: it would have opened a period of inevitable mourning, but at the same time it would have forced me to start a new library from scratch".

This Friday, the winning work of the first Almadía - Ventosa Arrufat International Short Novel Prize, endowed with 20,000 euros, for which 2,204 manuscripts were submitted, was to be presented in Madrid. The jury, made up of three renowned authors, Cristina Rivera Garza, Selva Almada, and Mónica Ojeda, had chosen Donde el agua trabaja, the first novel by the Peruvian lawyer David Silva Rojas (Ica, 1981).

"Laura Galve's first novel unfolds with intelligence and audacity the story of a girl who tells us, in the first person, a piece of adolescence marked by her mother's abandonment and living with an alcohol-addicted father". With these words, Mariana Enriquez, president of the jury for the Diana Zaforteza award, endowed with 20,000 euros, presents the winning work of the third edition of the prize, Dime, niña bonita, which Galaxia Gutenberg will release on November 4th. Its author, Laura Galve (Barcelona, 1996), combined journalism and cultural communication before working as a literary scout. "Between one job and the other, I have been looking for gaps to write this story, and it has not been easy for me for two reasons: because I could not find the time and because of the book's subject matter," acknowledges Galve.

Four of the pillars of the poetry of Jaume Pont i Ibáñez (Lleida, 1947-2026) have been love, madness, chance, and death. Having died this Thursday at the age of 79, Pont, who held a degree in philosophy and letters, made a name for himself with Límit(s) in 1976, published by the emblematic Llibres del Mall, and not long after he founded and directed the influential magazine Quaderns de Ponent (1979-1983), which helped to disseminate and critically value the work of creators from the Terres de Lleida such as Maria-Mercè Marçal,, Josep Maria Sala-Valldaura, and Pere Rovira.

There are novels that feed on chilling real crimes and, by narrating them, bring them back to the table to show the horror the victims suffered. Cosamala (Seix Barral), by Alana S. Portero (Madrid, 1978), goes a little further, because it transcends denunciation through recreation and transformation, thanks to a prose of precise and unsettling beauty, of an episode of the Spanish Civil War experienced in Guillena, a municipality located about 20 km north of Seville. An episode that still shakes everyone who hears about it today, both for its brutality and for the chronological proximity of its discovery.

“There are essays that begin with the burst of a force that does not fade, and this one by Xavier Nueno, which is magnificent, is aware of it: as it progresses, the excitement and intrigue grow to end up discovering the origin of the simulacrum of knowledge that is artificial intelligence, and where all this gigantic scam comes from, at least for the humanities,” explains Jordi Gracia, one of the six members of the jury for the Anagrama Essay Prize, endowed with 10,000 euros, which has been awarded to The Revolt of the Copyists, which will go on sale on October 21st.

"We are in an era of manifest mistrust: it seems we do not know where things are headed, or perhaps we do not want to know, and all this generates discomfort and restlessness," said philosopher Josep Ramoneda to Esther Vera, director of the ARA, and Xavier Mas de Xaxàs, journalist for La Vanguardia, the two speakers at the closing conversation of the Cap Roig Meetings of the La Caixa Foundation, held this weekend.

"I had never entered a literary contest to avoid coming in last,", asserted Isabel Allende during her acceptance speech for the 75th Planeta Prize, endowed with one million euros, which meant she would leave Penguin Random House and join the group currently presided over by José Creuheras. The news has reopened, once again, the controversy over publishers changing by some authors, often spurred by literary awards for unpublished work, but also by economic offers difficult to refuse (although they do not usually transcend), by the desire to give a new boost to their career by changing houses and even as a sign of protest.

For several years now, Catalan readers have been able to savor the meticulous, introspective, and hallucinatory prose of Mircea Cartarescu (Bucharest, 1956). While Periscopi published Solenoid (2017) and the Blinding trilogy (2018-2022), novels translated by Antònia Escandell Tur, thanks to the Mallorcan publisher Lleonard Muntaner and translator Xavier Montoliu Pauli, the volumes of short stories Why We Love Women (2016), the poems of Nothing (2018), an extensive and essential anthology of his Diaries (2024) have arrived, and now, Travesti, which according to the Romanian author was "the beginning of everything that has come after." This short novel, published in Romanian in 1994, presents a 34-year-old writer who, with the desire to emerge from the crisis he finds himself in, recalls the summer of his adolescence spent in camps where contact with nature, music, and inquiries into his own sexuality changed his life.

A total of 1,424 novels were hoping to win the 75th Planeta award until a few minutes ago, when the publisher announced, in a press conference at the Palau de la Música, which are the ten finalist works that the jury will take into account in the final deliberation, which will be made public during a dinner at Pavilion 1 of the Fira de Barcelona, in Montjuïc. "We can only be grateful to all those who have entrusted us with their most precious treasure, the effort of their creativity –assured José Creuheras, current president of Grupo Planeta–. Our great aspiration is to give maximum popularity to the winning work, regardless of the critical reception the books may have, which are ultimately endorsed by the response of the readers, which is very high and has increased in recent editions".

New York Times journalist Amanda Hess became pregnant when she was approaching 35. Perhaps because she has specialized professionally in studying new technologies—especially those derived from the internet—the first thing Hess did was to announce that she was pregnant to the phone application that monitored her menstrual cycles. This was the beginning of a very close relationship between the journalist's mobile phone and the gestation of the child, which unexpectedly became complicated from the seventh month onwards. Five years after giving birth, Amanda Hess published Second Life (now in Catalan at Saldonar, translated by Elena Ordeig), where she combines her personal testimony with the analysis of fertility apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, freebirth influencers and Facebook groups and forums about rare diseases. The author connects with ARA via video call from the apartment in New York where she lives with her husband and their two children. She responds with precision and without sparing details, despite addressing delicate topics.

The 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.

Even though she is approaching 80 years old and Parkinson's has caused her to lose her beloved handwriting, the poetic and essayistic work of Anne Carson, 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, knows how to preserve its youth thanks to a secret that her readers know well: a mischievous, perceptive, and erudite sense of humor, without the latter implying pedantry.

Manuel Vilas (Barbastro, 1962) has reached that point in his career where he can combine the publication of the new novels he writes with the recovery of out-of-print books that he feels he wrote "in another life." This year he has released Iceland (Destination, 2026), in which he reconstructs, without sparing any detail, the separation from the writer Ana María Merino, and, at the same time, claims "the anti-bourgeois voice" of the desperate and funny narrator of Zeta, which Páginas de Espuma puts into circulation more than two decades after the first edition by DVD Ediciones, divided then into two volumes, Zeta (2002) and Magic (2004).