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."

On April 4th, coinciding with the start of Comic Barcelona, The ARA will once again publish a special daily newspaper with all the news illustrated by comic book artists.The cover will be designed by Nadia Hafid (Terrassa, 1990), an essential figure in the new generation of Catalan comics. Her drawings unfold a hypnotic vectorial web of straight lines that reveal the essence of the reality she portrays. In her latest work, Bad smell, which Finestres publishes in Catalan and Apa Apa In Spanish, Hafid analyzes the labor policies of a fictional company, Angle Group, where only women work. A sterile, uniform, supposedly egalitarian environment, in which a strange odor reveals all the racism and hypocrisy of the corporate culture and, by extension, the rest of society.

In the early hours of December 16, 2005, three young men set fire to Rosario Endrinal, a homeless woman who was sleeping in an ATM in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood of Barcelona. When Ferran Grau (Lleida, 1982) learned about the events of the so-called ATM Crime, he realized that that same day he had walked past the ATM without noticing Endrinal. "I asked myself who was more murderous, those boys who killed her or me, who didn't see her, as if she were part of the street furniture," recalls Grau. Two decades later, Grau has won the Ventanas prize for narrative in Catalan for the best book of 2024 for Hyperrabies (Angle), the novel about that crime and its perpetrators.