A sound artistic duo, a writer, a publishing house, a stage director, a musician, an actor, and a playwright are the winners of the 2026 National Culture Awards, the accolades that have been presented since 2009 by the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CoNCA). The winners are Cabosanroque, Pol Guasch, Jande Editorial, Àlex Ollé, Sílvia Pérez Cruz, Oriol Pla, and Victoria Szpunberg, as announced this Friday at an event held at the Pau Casals Auditorium in El Vendrell, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Pau Casals. The ceremony was hosted by journalist Andrea Gumes and was attended by the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, the Minister of Culture, Sònia Hernández Almodóvar, and the President of the CoNCA, Margarida Troguet. Each award comes with a prize of 20,000 euros, and starting this year, there are no longer five winners, but seven. In their acceptance speeches, the winners agreed on championing culture, collective values, and public services as tools to confront reactionary forces.

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 In it, she recovers articles published in the press, prologues, award acceptance speeches, and some unpublished pieces where she combines autobiographical notes with burning issues of current affairs, such as addiction to mobile phones and the resurgence of racism.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.

"Thank you for inviting me. I know how you are with tourists. I appreciate you are not throwing anything at me," says the Englishwoman Sheena Patel as a joke to break the ice. We are at the presentation of her first novel, Soc fan, at La Central de Consell de Cent. The writer really knows how to deliver opening lines, because her novel's is: "I stalk a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as me." Bam. "I'd give anything for a joke," she'll confess later, which is another good streak.

Several novels by Zadie Smith (London, 1975), one of the most important writers in contemporary English literature, had been published in Catalan since her debut, White teethBut the vicissitudes of the publishing world (what gory novel wouldn't Smith herself write!) have condemned it to the unglamorous oblivion of secondhand bookstores, and thus the appearance ofThe fraud, her latest novel, splendidly translated by Marta Pera and published by the very young Jande publishing houseThis is great news. And we hope there will be many more to come, because Smith's novels are too good not to be part of the literary conversation among Catalan-language book readers.

Migrant mothers It is not only Fátima Saheb's debut collection of poems, but also the beginning of a cooperative publishing project, Jande, with which the young editors Aissata M'ballo Diao and Diana Rahmouni Audenis aim to discover new voices from here who are racialized or of migrant descent and also to incorporate translations of authors such as the climate activist Mikaela Loach.