“Before, I wanted to change the world. Now I am aware that I cannot. What I can do, at least, is help a small portion of this unsalvageable world”, explains Quinny Martínez Hernández (Colombia, 1979), poet, activist and director of FILMIG, the Itinerant Migrant Book Fair, which celebrates its third edition from April 13 to 18 in Barcelona in various venues, such as the Casinet d’Hostafrancs Civic Center – where the fairgrounds are located – or the Gabriel García Márquez and Sant Pau-Santa Creu libraries. All the activities of the event, which include from discussions to film screenings or a closing concert, are free. The team has never considered charging admission, because they follow the principles of the social and solidarity economy.

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.

We know that there are journeys that cross geographies and journeys that cross consciences. In the former, the gaze is fixed on the destination; in the latter, deeper and more silent, thought evidences the outcome of the world, a dark and hidden world that is revealed with each step. Extinction is an immersion into the bernhardian universe, into a deep place where lucidity and vertigo are confused. When Thomas Bernhard (Heerlen, Netherlands, 1931 - Austria, 1989) publishes Extinction. A Descent in 1986, he has taken his writing to the limit. It is his last novel, the most extensive, the most radically closed and suffocating, like a windowless room where the air has been slowly consumed. That we can read it today in Catalan is thanks to the translation by Clara Formosa Plans, and Quid Pro Quo Edicions' commitment to demanding authors who enrich our spirit.The work consists of two parts: The telegram and The will. In the first, Franz-Josef Murau, self-exiled in Rome, receives a telegram: “Parents and Johannes dead in accident. Caecilia, Amalia”. The news of the death of his parents and brother in a trivial accident due to chance does not apparently represent a great catastrophe for him, but it forces him to return to Wolfsegg, the family castle, a place where the spirit is destroyed with methodical efficiency. The return becomes a condemnation and unleashes a mental avalanche of memories, judgments, insults, guilt, reproaches, and hatreds. Murau gives himself over to an inextinguishable obsessive rhetoric with a single purpose: to use language as a tool for extinction. Wolfsegg is not only a decadent aristocratic rural estate, but a machine for the destruction of the mind and for submission, where its five libraries are locked up, a refuge for subsidized Catholic National Socialist hunters. Wolfsegg is Austria itself, with its outdated nobility and its oppressive national Catholicism. When Murau decides to symbolically destroy Wolfsegg, there is no redemption, only the final gesture of a condemned man.Talk to destroy

Murau speaks. He speaks to destroy. But every sentence that wants to free him chains him more deeply to what he hates. And here the characters must be considered. The mother, a fierce administrator of domestic resentment, is a fanatical Catholic manipulator. The father, a political opportunist, a powerful industrialist and a National Socialist sympathizer. Johannes, the brother, an anodyne and obedient being, destined to perpetuate the comedy. And the sisters Amalia and Caecilia, emblems of family decay, who are copies without an original. We still find a brother-in-law, the maker of wine bottle stoppers, a petty bourgeois who, with his insubstantiality and mental weakness, wanders through Wolfsegg during the funeral. On the other hand, we have Archbishop Spadolini, the high official of the Vatican Curia, admired and hated, who represents the sophisticated and international version of religious power. A functionary of the spirit. Fortunately, there is the beloved and admired Uncle Georg, the narrator's mentor, the guide who liberates Morau from this disgusting and oppressive world. And also Gambetti, the narrator's Roman student, a friend and sole interlocutor. And Maria, the brilliant poet, a literary transfiguration of Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom he maintains a relationship of admiration and dependence. The author uses the figure of Gambetti as a conversationalist, but in fact there is no dialogue. Bernhard had already brought this structure to the theatre, both in Ritter, Dene, Voss (1984)and in Plaza de los héroes (1988), imposing a central voice that speaks before presences that cannot contradict it. Extinction, therefore, takes the form of a bare stage, with a single actor under the spotlight, a spotlight that burns and does not go out. And as always, the wealth of an unparalleled narrative style: obsessive repetition, circular rhythm, the sentence that returns again and again over the same wound, turning prose into a relentless hypnotic music. A language that advances like a sawmill. This is the author's most stripped-down work, the most devoid of narrative curtains and closest to the act of thinking against oneself. Only a subterranean, dry, and cruel comic element prevents the text from sinking into pure despair. To read Thomas Bernhard one must accept a discipline: to renounce entertainment and endure the harshness of raw thought. Because with him there is no catharsis or comfort, only a form of terrible clarity, a fierce lucidity that cleanses like an acid and that forces the reader to examine themselves thoroughly, with no possibility of looking at the origin again with innocence. Extinction, therefore, is not a novel to be loved, but a work written to abolish self-deception.

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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.

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When you've read an author with admiration, you end up loving them, and that's why for many readers of Julian Barnes it will be difficult to start reading Farewells (Editorial Angle) without feeling a pang in my heart. Before even starting it, we already know that this is the last book we will read by the author. He has made this explicit, both in the title and in the interviews he has given. Barnes is eighty years old, ill, and doesn't want to leave a book unfinished, so, with a serenity not without irony, he decided that this was the end of his literary career.

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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.

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The 7lletres literary prize is entering a new phase with a name change intended to reinforce its identity and cultural ambition. The 21st edition, presented at Concabella Castle, officially adopts the name 7letres. Manuel de Pedrolo Short Story Prize, a decision that explicitly links the award to the writer from Aranyó and strengthens its position within the Catalan literary scene. The presentation on Monday brought together representatives from the Segarra County Council, the Cervera City Council, the Els Plans de Sió Town Council, and the Tàrrega Town Council—the four institutions that promote the project and have renewed their collaboration agreement. This image of institutional unity reinforces a model of cultural cooperation that, from a local perspective, has successfully consolidated an initiative launched in 2006 with the aim of honoring Pedrolo and, at the same time, stimulating contemporary creative writing.

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With an already immense and Basque weariness towards the subject, I read that these days Mr. Juanma Bajo Ulloa –a film director who, some time ago, mesmerized me (at fourteen years old I went to the Fantasio cinema three times to see Butterfly wings) but which I later abandoned completely – goes around the world whining and saying that if you're not a woman or don't follow certain rules woke You're in a very difficult position in the film industry. I haven't seen the interview, nor will I: I'm speaking from hearsay. Some have come forward to refute Ulloa's claims with data, especially Javier Zurro: in short, we could say that, in terms of subsidies, there are a few extra points (very few) if some of the main positions are held by a woman. This is a measure that exists to correct the historical and ominous bias that films made by women have suffered. However, Zurro tells us that, despite the very small amount of support women receive, in 2023 only 36.5% of the projects that received funding had exclusively female directors, and in 2022, 37.8%; the same is true for the films in which RTVE invests: between 2020 and 2023, 63.7% had male directors. In other words, we continually hear the annoying refrain about poor men being left out, while the data confirms that men are still the majority in the industry.

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Last weekend, three of the five highest-grossing films were literary adaptations: the one by Wuthering Heights (which has raised 1.82 million euros in the State), the one of Hamnet (565,000 euros) and that ofThe assistant (€467,000). On Netflix, the streaming platform with the most subscribers, the list of most-watched English-language series globally during the week of February 9-15 also includes various book adaptations: The Bridgertons, Lincoln's lawyer and He and sheThis week, two of the standout premieres are, in fact, literary adaptations: the thriller erotic 56 days and the last season of Like Water for ChocolateThis is a version of the novel by Mexican author Laura Esquivel, which was also adapted for the big screen. Literary adaptations are nothing new in film or television, but rarely have they been so ubiquitous, to the point of wondering where all the new or original ideas have gone.

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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.

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It has been more than fifty years since the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom (1933-2026) found peace and creative inspiration on the island of Menorca. "It's the place where I've written a good part of my books and poems," he acknowledged six years ago, when he received the Formentor Prize for his prolific and highly regarded work, from his home in Amsterdam. At that time, Nooteboom, who had just turned 87, couldn't travel to the neighboring island to collect the award due to health reasons, but he still had the strength to recall the origins of an obsession with writing that materialized in over fifty books that made him one of the most important figures in the field. In his bibliography, there are at least three titles available in Catalan. The following story (2004), Paradise lost (2006) and Detour to Santiago (2010), all three published by Bromera.

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On August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie (Bombay, 1947) nearly died from the numerous stab wounds inflicted on his face, torso, and limbs by the young Hadi Matar. The author explained the attack, which left him blind in one eye and unable to use his left hand, in Knife (Penguin Random House, 2025), a "horror and survival story" that spurred the novelist to return to his preferred world, that of fiction. The result, The penultimate hour (Penguin, 2026), has just arrived in bookstores with the great anticipation that each new release from the writer provokes..

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The other day I went to a high school where the second-year students had read Biography of FireThis book is certainly not the most suitable for high school students, because some of the stories deal with themes that may be too distant for them, and, in general, it has a level of complexity that, given the current state of reading comprehension, suggests it might not be easy for them. However, these talks in secondary schools are always interesting, especially because you realize they're surprised that writers are normal people. And part of the job is this: to get teenagers to stop seeing us as a kind of repressed, old-fashioned bookworm who doesn't write about life but about empty intellectual abstractions. This talk was also interesting, especially when the topic of sex came up.

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When they told him that The Sleeping Garden (Univers/Espasa) fit perfectly among the novels of healing fiction (Healing fiction), Carla Gracia Mercadé (Barcelona, ​​1980) didn't know much about what she was being told. "I wrote the book I needed, a refuge I went into when things were bad," the writer explains. Evocative and full of beauty, Gracia's fifth novel is the story of a woman living on autopilot with a latent grief until she goes to the Empordà to awaken a dormant garden. Iris will find in the plants a home and a peace of incalculable value, but to get there she will have to decide who she wants to be.

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"A son is like the sea. He shines before the houses, and a voice in his eyes the morning, the midday, the murky sunset, and the night, warm, violet, and crystallized like a glass of wine." Thus begins the moving and delicate monologue of the mother of Andreu Crous, protagonist ofHaceldamaHe recites to the chronicler who records his humble and unfortunate life after his death as a result of the train bombing perpetrated by his son. It is one of the most impressive and also one of the most controversial episodes in the second novel by Blai Bonet (Santanyí,1926 - Cala Figuera, 1997), published in Aymá Published in 1959 and now reissued, two decades after Ensiola's version (2005), by Club Editor, restoring the original text without the censorship, especially editorial, of the proofreaders of the time.

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With Mr. Potter –translated into Catalan by Carme Geronès–, the writer Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua, Caribbean, 1949) constructs a powerful novel, a piece of incisive prose that makes lack—of affection, of words, of recognition—its creative engine. The book presents itself as the portrait of a seemingly irrelevant man, Roderick Potter, an illiterate taxi driver from Antigua, while simultaneously offering an impeccable dissection of the colonial, patriarchal, and affective structures that make this irrelevance possible. Kincaid doesn't rescue his character: he looks him straight in the eye, with a lucidity that is unsettling.

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Enamored with Lisbon's culture, Edu Castro (Vigo, 1966) has been getting lost in the streets of Lisbon for a year and a half now, strolling through the parks, where he sits down to read some of the books that have accompanied him throughout his career: Don Quixote, History of Western Philosophy, Ulysses either The man without attributesThe former Barça coach and current Benfica manager is an avid reader and is taking advantage of his time in Portugal to delve deeper into the literature of José Saramago and Antonio Lobo Antunes. "Leaving Barça is never planned, but I'm making the most of my time at Benfica. It wasn't a goal I had set, but once it happens, it's exciting," he explains to ARA. Born in Vigo, although raised in Bellvitge, he is a lawyer by profession who entered the world of hockey by chance. "Espanyol's hockey section didn't have a place to play their matches and they rented the rink at a school in Bellvitge, Joan XXIII. We saw the sport, fell in love with it, and both my brothers and I started playing." At 59, he manages Benfica, where he currently has a contract until June 2027. "Coaches are always dealing with temporary situations, and in a sport like ours, where there are few projects you can make a living from professionally, that's the reality." This means that, for the time being, he lives alone in Lisbon, far from his family; but Edu Castro has found the positive side: "Being alone gives me more time to dedicate to literature and hockey. You always have to make a virtue of necessity."

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Every day I get more and more annoyed by the clichés and conventions that infest all kinds of fiction, whether written or audiovisual: that car that won't start in a moment of panic (but will start at the last second); that conversation between two people that's already finished, but which is reignited the moment one of them leaves and grabs the door handle: the other calls them by name and then says something profound; pregnancies, whose first sign is too often vomiting, while in real life vomiting only occurs in 50% or 60% of cases, but, of course, making a woman vomit is visually more interesting than dialogue; similarly, fictional births are the great deception: water breaking is cinematically more suggestive, even though in real life only one in ten women's water breaks at the moment labor begins; not to mention what comes after: these are the kinds of births that very few midwives have ever witnessed. The characters are also stereotypical, that is, clichéd: the other day I saw Goodbye JuneTo my great disappointment, the roles of the three daughters were repetitions, rehashes: the daughter obsessed with meditation and herbal spiritual nonsense, the capitalist daughter, and prick who never stops working, the devoted and somewhat disorganized mother. I understand, of course, that sometimes, for the sake of narrative economy, a certain simplification is necessary when telling a story, and tropes, conventions, and stereotypes are just that: simplifications that make it easier and shorten the process, but I get the impression that we're going too far. This excessive simplification brings with it a significant leap: fictions cease to represent reality and now only represent themselves. With the advent of AI, all this only gets worse.

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Although the winners of prestigious awards like the Sant Jordi, Carles Riba, Llibres Anagrama, and Josep Pla prizes are yet to be announced, most publishers have already begun revealing their new releases scheduled for before Sant Jordi. The first quarter is typically one of the busiest periods of the year, as January marks the start of the long race to reach April 23rd.

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