If you see them together, you can imagine what their weekend vermouth sessions were like. Jordi Puntí, Miqui Otero, and Irene Pujadas shared a radio storytelling segment on The supplement from Catalunya Radio. The idea, which originated with Puntí, has a literary basis: apparently, Paul Auster asked listeners of American National Public Radio to send in their stories, and he, with minimal editing, would create a narrative and read it on air. The Catalan version of the experiment was titled It seems unbelievable. The idea was for listeners to send one-minute anecdotes to Catalan public radio via WhatsApp, which writers would then capture and, like a literary machine, transform into short stories.

If the t-shirt that patron Sergi Ferrer-Salat wore last year to the Finestres awards ceremony said "tax the rich", the one worn this year by Estefania Rico, director of the Ferrer Foundations, said"Silence is complicity"You will never hear at any other cultural event, much less one funded by a pharmaceutical company, that 'privileged elites unmoved by suffering' are singled out and that the 'redistribution of wealth to society' is defended in such a radical way." Rico says that 50% of Ferrer Internacional's net profits, everything that doesn't go to social, sports, and food programs, amount to 20 million euros each year. He reminds us that a new Finestres Palestina bookstore will open in Gràcia. Pema Maymó, David Fernández, Marta Salicrú, Anna Guitart... We are at the Liceu Conservatory, a foundation also chaired by Ferrer-Salat, who also has a music foundation that awards scholarships to students, some of whom will be performing today. The Finestres awards are the most lucrative for published work, with a prize of 25,000 euros. (comic book) Creamed gums, by Natalia Velarde (Reservoir Books), and in children's or young adult comics, Super potato against nanomalice, ofArtur Laperla (Bang Editions). Irene Pujadas wins the Ventanas prize for narrative in Catalan for The intruder (L'Otra), ahead of the novels by Jordi Lara and Toni Sala. Silvana Vogt has won the prize in Spanish for The fine art of creating monsters (H&O). "I'm 56 years old and now I know what I want to be when I grow up," she says upon receiving it. Until now, she hadn't dared to call herself a writer; Vogt was the bookseller at Cal Llibreter in Sant Just. Curiously, she began publishing in Catalan: "Exile was very hard, and I chose, more than a country, to stop speaking my language," she recalls. "After 23 years here, I've reconciled with my country. Poor Argentina, I forgive you!" Irene Pujadas—whom I see suffering when I approach to speak with her parents, who aren't coming through the door today—is happy "that the nonsense I'd been writing alone at home has found readers" and tells me that the Finestres check gives her "peace of mind and time."

In one of my childhood memories, I picture a friend and I frightened in the middle of a demonstration in defense of our town's natural aquifer. I also remember my friend's aunt looking at us all overwhelmed, not knowing how to get rid of us, huffing and puffing and saying: "You are at the age of turkey."The expression is not correct in Catalan (Optimot recommends saying "the age of the cake"), but that doesn't mean that we didn't find it very funny.