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 Prize tonight in Barcelona. But this is not, in this case, about a machine capable of generating a novel that has deceived the jury, but rather the initials of the winning author, Isabel Allende, the best-selling living novelist in Hispanic literature, with over 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 has offered 1.1 million euros to the winner, Anne Carson– to culminate her extensive career and star in a publishing 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).

Although it takes place in the 17th century, Modern fairies, the first novel by the British author Clare Pollard (Bolton, 1978) that we can read in English thanks to Club Editor and the work of Yannick Garcia, is written from a radically contemporary perspective. Presented with more sense of humor and irreverence than the Hamnet of Maggie O'Farrell (L'Altra / Libros del Asteroide, 2021) and in a more credible tone than the torn-apart rereading of the Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë by Emerald Fennell, 2026, Pollard sends readers to the lavish Parisian salons in which writers such as Charles Perrault (1628-1703) and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy (1652-1705) contributed to popularizing and redefining the fairy tales that, in many cases, had grown above all thanks to word of mouth among the rural population.

It has been more than half a century since Colm Tóibín (Enniscorthy, 1955) read his first Henry James (New York, 1843 - London, 1916). "I had just turned 19, and I entered that very particular world with The Portrait of a Lady –he recalls now–. It was in the summer, and I discovered it for pleasure, without anyone recommending it or demanding it as a university course reading. It interested me so much that I went on to read the rest of his work over the following years, and then I reread it, and I ended up writing many articles about it. Since The Portrait of a Lady, I have never stopped keeping James in mind".

Perhaps because "everyone lies at one time or another" –as Jean-Luc Nancy states in La vérité du mensonge (Bayard, 2021)–, truth is in a permanent crisis. This crisis has been aggravated over the last decades by the end of the single narrative advocated by postmodernity, the multiplication of the capacity for impact and the transmission of lies through social media, which have become one of the great trending topics of our present, and the worrying expansion of falsehoods that artificial intelligence can transmit.

Enrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, 1948) did not take home the million euros from the Aena prize a few months ago, but he is a firm candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which will be announced on October 8th at one in the afternoon and has, in addition to a similar endowment, incomparable prestige.

Although We, the Survivors (Les Hores/Anagrama) is the first novel by Tash Aw (Taipei, 1971) that we can read in Catalan, the work of this author born in Taiwan, raised in Malaysia, and emigrated to the United Kingdom has had a remarkable international journey for two decades. With his debut, The Harmony Silk Factory (Harper, 2005; in Spanish at Salamandra, with the title La fábrica de sedas), he was already a Booker finalist, a merit he has repeated on two more occasions: with Five Star Billionaire (Fourth State, 2013) and also with We, the Survivors. Translated into more than twenty languages (in Catalan by Míriam Cano), Tash Aw explores in his novels the day-to-day life of the Malaysian working class. We, the Survivors narrates, with remarkable precision and subtlety, the sexual awakening of a 16-year-old boy in parallel with his parents' marital crisis and his relationship with his sisters.

In person, Zadie Smith (London, 1975) has as much character as the protagonists of her novels. For years, the author of novels such as White Teeth (2000) and NW (2012) –in Catalan at La Magrana– has combined fiction with essays, and this week she has visited Barcelona to present her latest and lush collection of non-fiction texts, Feel Free (Jande/Salamandra; translated into Catalan by Elena Ordeig Vila). In it, she recovers articles published in the press, prologues, award acceptance speeches, and some unpublished pieces where she combines autobiographical notes with burning issues of current affairs, such as addiction to mobile phones and the resurgence of racism. Smith, who has shared a conversation about beauty at the CCCB with the writer Édouard Louis, regrets having agreed to give interviews after having had a rough night. Perhaps that is why her answers are brief, although they cannot avoid containing, in essence, a sample of the novelist's intelligence.

The reader who starts Les conseqüències (Proa, 2026), the fifth novel by Pere Antoni Pons (Campanet, 1980), will have trouble stopping reading the story, magnetic, intriguing, and crafted with great skill, of a writer and journalist who, after his divorce and in the midst of a complex new romantic relationship, resumes contact with an old high school friend who will propose he investigate the mysterious visit to Mallorca of two Nazi officers in the middle of the Second World War. This is the starting point of a book that is devoured while following the adventures of a middle-aged man who, in parallel to his vital disorientation, knows how to unearth links between the fascism of the 1940s, the far-right groups that surfaced during the Transition, and the current resurgence of an ultraconservative radicalism. Three and a half years after Contra el món (Empúries, 2023), Les conseqüències confirms the skill and ambition of Pons, a poet, narrator, and literary critic (at ARA) who knows how to combine the speed required by a thriller with the digestion demanded by a novel of ideas, concerned with the anti-democratic and neoliberal drift of our present.

The Catalan Book Week is not satisfied with the 9,000 m² it occupies at the Passeig Lluís Companys in Barcelona until Sunday and is expanding into some activities outside the venue, such as the cocktail party celebrating the 50 years of La Magrana hosted at the Maritime Museum, with the presence of some of the authors who make up the current catalog of the label, such as Montse Virgili, David Moragas, Núria Perpinyà, Aina Gatnau, and M. Mercè Cuartiella. Also Cristina Genebat, winner of the first edition of the Lo Somni award with Sorra, who shortly before the start of the party could not find, like other authors from the house, which entrance to the museum to use. "Don't worry, sooner or later we will find the way," the novelist Aniol Florensa, whom she had just met, told her rightly, shortly before meeting a future author of the house, Paula Vidal, who will debut at La Magrana at the beginning of 2027.

La Setmana del Llibre en Català ha estat fidel a la cita anual amb els lectors des del 1983. Al llarg dels anys, la seva ambició ha anat creixent, i també ha crescut la resposta del públic, que en l'última dècada no ha deixat d'augmentar. Instal·lada al passeig Lluís Companys de Barcelona, la fira i festival té previst rebre enguany més de 100.000 visitants, que comprovaran una vegada més la frondositat i diversitat de l'oferta actual del llibre en català. La 44a edició de la Setmana estarà oberta del 18 al 27 de setembre, deu dies en què es programaran més de 350 activitats de tota mena –recitals, taules rodones, converses, contacontes i pòdcasts– que apel·len a un públic transversal.

The solid, versatile and successful literary journey of Ramon Solsona (Barcelona, 1950) has been recognized this year with the 30th Trajectòria award from the Setmana del Llibre en Català, which will be held at the Passeig Lluís Companys in Barcelona from September 18 to 27. The author of Les hores detingudes (Quaderns Crema, 1993), L'home de la maleta (Proa, 2011) and Allò que va passar a Cardós (Proa, 2016) will collect the award and take stock of his creative life in one of the central events of the fair and literary festival on September 23, at 7 p.m.

Lluís Llort has waited until the age of 60 to debut as an author of short stories. Born in Barcelona in 1966, the cultural journalist and novelist with a long and fruitful career has just published Short (crims.cat), thirty-seven narratives that "have discomfort as a common nexus". "Discomfort seems like a minor feeling, but it is more present in me than many of the feelings that abound in crime novels, such as revenge and hatred," the author asserts.

The 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 seguit de Llengua materna (Proa, 2025) for "its ability to transition, with identical genius, from the impassioned language of historical denunciation to the delicacy of 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". "They called me shortly before lunch, while I was working on my new novel from home, in Llucmajor –comments the Majorcan author and ARA columnist by phone–. I picked up because I thought it would be about work, but I could not have expected it to be María José Gálvez, the Director General for Books of the Ministry of Culture. She informed me of the jury's deliberations, which had just concluded".

Sandra Bruna (Barcelona, 1973) made the decision to launch her own literary agency when she was only 28 years old, even though she already had a decade of experience in the sector. A quarter of a century later, the agency represents a hundred authors –among whom are Maria Barbal, Francesc Miralles, Alejandro Palomas and Care Santos– and has a dozen employees. The first thing one sees when entering the office located on Carrer Còrsega in Barcelona's Eixample district is a large window from which the towers, already in an advanced phase of construction, of the Sagrada Família rise up. The image is a good metaphor for the Catalan agency itself, which despite being one of the most important still has the ambition to expand a little more.

Ian McEwan is approaching 80 years old with no intention of slowing down his creative pace. Born in 1948 in Aldershot (England), the author of Atonement (2001) and Saturday (2005) –both available in English at Anagrama– has recently experienced the loss of some of his generational peers, such as Martin Amis, who passed away in 2023, and has also witnessed other novelists announce that they were stopping their writing, as in the case of Julian Barnes. "For some time now, I have had to attend a few funerals of people I knew, and I have realized the amount of things that I did not know about them. The dead observe us with a touch of shame and another of pride for all that we do not know about them," explains McEwan from his home, on the occasion of the presentation of his new novel.

The robust, flexible, and young voice of Irene Solà (Malla, 1990) has won over thousands of readers around the world in less than a decade, and is currently one of the most translated and beloved authors in Catalan literature. The meteoric and still rising trajectory of the writer from Osona might lead the most malicious minds to think of a pact with the devil to gain such unusual repercussions. Solà has managed to have When I Sing and the Mountain Dances (Anagrama, 2019) translated into 23 languages and has garnered awards such as the Anagrama Novel Prize, the European Union Prize for Literature, and the Nota Bene Prize. Before this great success, which included a theatrical adaptation and even a symphonic work, Solà had already received the Documenta Prize for The Dikes (L'Altra, 2017) and the Amadeu Oller Prize for Beast (Galerada, 2012), her only collection of poems, which Anagrama has just reissued.