There is a teenage memory in the life of Irene Rubio (Sallent, 1991) that remained etched in her mind. When she was 16 years old, one day her mother decided to teach her how to make macaroni. "She put me there, with the boiling pot in front of me, and told me: 'Now you have to put salt in the water.' When I asked her why, she replied: 'Because that's how it's been done all my life,'" explains the writer. Over time, she realized that this answer was repeated on other occasions, and this made her uneasy. From that strangeness, Rubio has made a novel: Seràs la vall (L'Altra Editorial), with which she has won the Documenta 2025 prize, it is a dystopia about a female community that has always lived constrained by ancestral customs.

The screams, a novel with which Víctor Recort (Sant Boi de Llobregat, 1990) has won the latest Documenta award -shared ex aequo with Irene Zurrón—, begins with a man getting into an elevator that is one of those "modernist gems that the City Council has classified as a heritage asset of the city." On the floor where the man, Eloi, is going, he is met by Milan, a veteran presenter of a trashy TV show he had collaborated on years ago, Coco, another fellow talk show host, and the corpse of a dead girl, "the tomato girl." The story progresses in two time periods: the countdown to get rid of that lifeless body and the memory of the last summer Eloi spent with his wife and two children.

A black cat in the garden It is a collection of eight stories set in small towns and starring women who love from a heartbreaking nostalgia, from "a rage" that "disfigured" the narrator. Before winning ex aequo the Documenta award with this book, Irene Zurrón (Palma, 1990) wrote a children's novel, The tribe in the middle of the mountain (Tándem, 2021), but A black cat in the garden is her debut in short fiction. A debut that doesn't seem like one thanks to the quality of the writing, the refined style and the powerful language that the author masters with ease.

Few literary awards can boast a 45-year history like Documenta. "Our goal continues to be to find voices that are forward-looking proposals to enrich the Catalan literary scene," says Èric del Arco, who has been a member of the the Documenta bookstore promotes the award, along with La Otra Editorial. This year, and unintentionally, the jury ended up awarding two works instead of one: The screams, second novel by Víctor Recort, and A black cat in the garden, Irene Zurrón's short story debut.