When Transbordo en Moscú, the last volume of Las tres leyes del movimiento, Eduardo Mendoza (Barcelona, 1943) thought it was time to retire. "The best thing I could do was retire, because I had already written everything I wanted to –he recalls at Casa del Libro in Barcelona–. Then I started to get bored and thought I would do something else without forgetting that I was in injury time." That was five years ago and, since then, Mendoza has published Tres enigmas para la Organización (2024) and, just this week, La intriga del funeral inconveniente, both published by Seix Barral, like the rest of his work. "Eduardo has often considered stopping writing and has even announced it, but we are lucky that he has done the opposite afterwards –admits Elena Ramírez, his editor–. Last year was very hectic for him, with everything that the Princess of Asturias Award and several trips entailed, including the Guadalajara Book Fair. Nothing suggested he was working on a new novel".

In a slightly more just world, the jury of the award to which Dolors Miquel (Lleida, 1960) submitted El pit adormit at the end of 2024 would have proclaimed her book as the winner. It didn't happen that way, but the work has finally seen the light of day: in almost 500 pages of impressive intensity and ambition, the poet –author of some twenty volumes, including Haikús del camioner (Empúries, 1999) and El guant de plàstic rosa (Edicions 62, 2016)– combines various narrative threads, such as the detection and evolution of the cancer that was diagnosed five years ago, the chronicle of how Catalan poetry was reborn in the late nineties thanks to an alternative circuit of readings, reflections on misogyny – that of the past and that of the present – and fragments in which family memories intertwine with a passion for reading and writing.

John Irving (New Hampshire, 1942) has been a writer much loved by Catalan readers for decades. Although he has just turned 84, he has no intention of retiring: Reina Esther (Edicions 62/Tusquets; Catalan translation by Ernest Riera) has just arrived in bookstores, a novel that revisits one of the most emblematic settings of his fiction, the St. Cloud's orphanage where The Cider House Rules (1985) took place. It is there, at the beginning of the 20th century, that a surly girl of Jewish origin, Esther Nacht, arrives. Readers will accompany her on her long life journey, which begins in Vienna, continues in the American state of Maine and, after passing through Europe again, ends in Israel in the early eighties.

The one million euros of the first Aena Award for Hispano-American Narrative has finally gone to the book of disturbing and dystopian short stories, El buen mal, by the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin, published by Seix Barral. The award, better endowed than the Nobel Prize in Literature and matching the Planeta Prize, was the icing on the cake of a gala as lavish as it was extravagant, held at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona with five live performances based on each finalist book and with most attendees dressed in "relaxed elegance," as requested on the invitation.

"Stories have memory, and if no one takes care of them, they die", proclaimed, at the entrance of the Sant Pau Modernist Site, the guide who would accompany the sixty or so chosen ones – readers, influencers and journalists – to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, one of the most emblematic settings of The Shadow of the Wind, the novel with which Carlos Ruiz Zafón (1964-2020) conquered the world 25 years ago.

A group of five adolescent friends living in a housing development in a small French provincial town decides to enter an abandoned house: the experience will be the starting point of a nightmare that will change their lives. This is the premise that floats on the surface of the plot of La nit devastada, the first novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (Toulouse, 1981) that we can read in Catalan thanks to the translation by Oriol Vaqué for Proa. Behind this horror premise lie family conflicts, abuse, and disappointments, but also the discovery of desire and the strength of friendship. After establishing himself before the age of 30 thanks to Una educación libertina (2008) and La sal (2010), both in Spanish published by Cabaret Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo once again focuses on the chiaroscuro of intimacy and social inequalities through a powerful story that pays homage to writers like Stephen King and filmmakers like John Carpenter and Wes Craven with a powerful, rich, and sensory literary style.

The "rural and polygonal" Basque Country of the 90s is resurrected in Pleibac, the second novel by Miren Amuriza (Berriz, 1990) which Pau Joan Hernàndez has translated into Catalan for Club Editor with grace and skill, to which he has added the transgressive linguistic vocation of the original. The book tells the story of friendship and betrayal between two adolescents, Jone and Polly, who grow up in the same Biscayan municipality where the author followed the family tradition of singing improvised verses in Basque. Years after establishing herself as a bertsolari and publishing several poetry collections, Amuriza tried her hand at prose in Basa (Elkar, 2019; in Spanish by Consonni), and now repeats the experience with a novel that flows down like a fresh beer after a party with friends.

The passage of time has not diminished the shyness of Jean Echenoz, but it has not managed to turn him into a cynical or disenchanted author. Born in Orange in 1947, the French writer has been one of the headliners of this year's Mot festival, but before that he passed through Barcelona with a new book in hand. Bristol (Raig Verd, 2026; translation by Anna Casassas) narrates decisive months in the life of Robert Bristol, a film director who is finishing the shoot of his latest film. It features effervescent, established, and semi-retired actresses, a solicitous but inconstant lover, an inspired policeman, a blackmailing general from South Africa, a bestselling author living in a palace, and a long list of supporting characters, human and animal, who further expand Echenoz's universe. The usual taste for details, the author's undeniable skill, and a sense of humor more subtle than our times make Bristol a pleasant and recommendable reading experience.

Italian music has just lost one of its most outstanding, prolific, and veteran voices, that of Gino Paoli, who died at the age of 91 in Genoa, the city where he had lived for decades. The long career of the musician and singer-songwriter, born on September 23, 1934, in Monfalcone—in the Friuli region—began in the late 1950s with a simple, elegant, and autobiographical song. The cat

"Writing a chronicle should be an act of freedom," Empar Moliner said towards the end of the presentation of his new novel, Instructions for living without her (Column, 2026), to the readers who listened to her with devotion this Monday evening at the Finestres bookstore. Among the audience were a man who bore a striking resemblance to Michel Houellebecq—one of Moliner's favorite authors—a former director of TV3, a handful of journalism students, and someone who exuded an intense stench of tobacco, camouflaged by the perhaps even more pervasive fragrance of chewing gum.

"Literary genres don't exist. For me, either there is literature or there isn't. We know what painting, architecture, sculpture, and music are—things change after John Cage—but it's not the same with literature. What is literature, and where do we find it? I can recognize it immediately: literature. I find it very evocative: literature. It excites me." Antoni Marí I used these words in 2012 to introduce Book of Absences (Tusquets), a magnificent example of the cultivated, demanding, and dazzling literary endeavor of the author born in Ibiza in 1944, who died in Barcelona at the age of 81. Shortly afterward, he added: "Literature is about fixing and dispelling the darkness."

Fish, the fifth novel that Eva Baltasar (Barcelona, ​​1978), published by Club Editor, tells the passionate yet destructive love story of two women. The first is a writer who narrates her journey of fascination, anguish, fear, and escape from her lover. The second, named Victoria, sells paper cones of fish at street markets and lives in a house reminiscent of those Gothic mansions where anything is possible. Translated into some twenty languages ​​and a Booker Prize finalist with BoulderBaltasar is one of the most internationally renowned authors of Catalan literature. Fish It confirms, once again, the singularity, power, and lyricism of his proposal.

The writer, playwright, and poet Gonçalo M. Tavares (Luanda, Angola, 1970), celebrated by critics and readers as one of the great voices of Portuguese and European literature, has won the Formentor Prize for Literature. The jury highlighted that in the last twenty-five years he "has built a literary oeuvre of powerful personality, dazzling originality, and vigorous imagination," which includes more than forty titles. A professor of literature at the University of Lisbon, he debuted in 2001 with the verses of Book of Dance Since then, he has built a prolific and unique body of work, exploring all literary genres, translated into more than fifty languages ​​and published in seventy countries. He is the third most translated Portuguese author, after Fernando Pessoa and José María Eza de Queiroz.

If one day, by chance, I happen to be on the subway with Màrius Serra (Barcelona, ​​1963), it's very likely that he has a notebook open in his hands and is writing frenetically. Don't even think about interrupting his creative flow: you could break the torrent of words that has ended up shaping a monumental novel like The misunderstanding (Proa, 2026). "A half-hour subway ride can be very productive," he says. "On a commuter train, the result can be spectacular. I like to practice writing on the move mainly for two reasons: first, because I'm away from my usual workplace; second, because I'm writing by hand, and I'm aware that what I'm doing is a first draft, something that gives me..."

The brain of Jeanette Winterson (Manchester, 1959) is so privileged that he is able to connect the stories of Arabian Nights with the dangers of artificial intelligence, the importance of libraries, and a still-valid lesson from psychoanalysis. "Without imagination there is no future," he argues from one of the rooms at the Open University of Catalonia, shortly before receiving his doctorate. honorary cause Throughout her career—everything we have built and all the solutions to overcome obstacles have come from the imagination. The most important thing we can offer young people is the superpower of imagination.” We must “protect, honor, and respect it,” just as Aladdin does with the magic lamp he finds inside a cave, which is the starting point of the author’s new book.Written on the body (1994) and Why be happy when you could be something normal? (2011).

"I'm sure you've all wondered at some point how to pronounce my friend László's surname," began translator and writer Adan Kovacsics, with a friendly smile, sitting next to the latest Nobel laureate in literature. "I have the answer," he continued. "It has to be separated into two parts, kraszna and horkaiIt is a word of Slavic origin: krasny It means pretty, and horkai, hill." The "pretty hill" that is László Krasznahorkai He was also smiling on Wednesday night at the CCCB while his friend assured everyone that the work of the author of Satanic Tango and Melancholy of resistance It connects with great classics like Dostoevsky and Kafka and broadens the spectrum of the contemporary novel thanks to its demanding nature, both in form and content.

The joy with which László Krasznahorkai (Gyula, 1954) received the news of the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, which was quickly tinged with anguish. "Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me: they congratulated me, asked for interviews, even though many of those journalists had never read me, and I even received a letter from the town where I was born inviting me to pay for a new wooden bridge they needed," he recalls in Barcelona, ​​months later. "All I wanted was to disappear," he insists. He couldn't make that dream a reality until January, shortly after delivering his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, in which, starting from the desire to address "hope," he ended up recounting a personal anecdote from the Berlin subway in the early 1990s: a homeless man appeared, struggling to urinate in a corner, and, unaware of his infraction, was chased after to stop him.

"Sometimes people tell me I write books like they used to, and I think they're just like they always were," he said this afternoon. Albert Sánchez Piñol (Barcelona, ​​1965) at the Museu Marítim, the chosen venue to present After the shipwreckThis is the first novel he has published with Univers – an imprint of Abacus Futur – after 25 years with La Campana. Despite changing literary trends and generational shifts, Sánchez Piñol remains faithful to the adventure novels that shaped him as a child and allowed him, thanks to Cold skin (La Campana, 2002), achieved unprecedented success in Catalan literature. If that novel, set on a remote island, had echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson, in Pandora in the Congo (The Bell, 2005) resonated within it Joseph Conrad, which has appeared in other books by the author. In After the shipwreckThe tribute is another great classic of the 19th century, Herman Melville

For thirteen years, Marisol Schulz (Mexico City, 1957) has been at the helm of the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), which a few months ago Barcelona was received as guest of honorSchulz received the Gold Medal for Cultural Merit from the Barcelona City Council this Wednesday. She was accompanied on this trip, which she describes as "very special," by her partner, daughter, and two grandchildren, who move about the hotel with enviable freedom. "I brought them all here because it's the first time I've received an honor like this," she says, ready to reminisce about her past as an editor—she directed Alfaguara Mexico for almost a decade—and her Valencian family roots.

Diagonal Manhattan, by Xavier Bosch (Column); Strong heart, by Silvia Soler (Universo), and This piece of lifeThe three novels originally written in Catalan that sold the most copies in 2025, according to the Libridata list, an online digital platform linked to the Guild of Booksellers of Catalonia that records the daily sale of books in more than 150 points in Catalonia, including bookstores and large stores. Bosch, Soler and Solé were already the best-selling authors during the last Sant Jordi festival. To which we should add Joël Dicker, although since it is a translation, it is not included in this ranking.