The criteria and decisions of the Nobel Prize in Literature are always quite unpredictable, but seen with the perspective that a century has given us, the Nobel awarded to Grazia Deledda in 1926 is still somewhat incomprehensible. Not because she was not literarily deserving, but because it seems that her condition as a Sardinian woman who wrote about the harsh and brutal reality of her native island was far removed from the committee of Swedish readers who had awarded George Bernard Shaw in 1925 and would award Henri Bergson in 1927. The prize only makes sense if we understand that Deledda was a peripheral writer who earned a place at the center of the Italian and European cultural landscape thanks to three merits and one concession: the merits of having talent, of doing a lot of work (she was the author of about thirty novels and four hundred short stories) and of achieving great international success, and the concession of renouncing her mother tongue, Sardinian, to write in the language, Tuscan-based Italian, that the reunification of Italy (1861) made official and imposed.The novel Cendra, originally published in 1903 and now presented in Catalan by Mercè Ubach in a translation that seems rigorous and with a prologue that contextualizes the work and the author, is a good entry point to Deledda's literary universe. A novel of passions and unshakeable community social codes, a story of primary characters and imposing landscapes, Cendra combines two literary traditions: that of popular storytelling and that of the nineteenth-century naturalist novel. We are closer, in any case, to the vivid anthropological drama of Giovanni Verga's verismo than to the analytical positivism, with its scientific gaze and socio-ideological background, ofÉmile Zola.Compensate for the brutality of a miserable world

In Cendra, Grazia Deledda demonstrates that she is an agile and vigorous storyteller and that she knows how to create a gallery of characters that border on the archetypal without falling into typological folklorization. She also demonstrates that she is a virtuoso of precise and exuberantly sensory descriptions. The paragraphs in which she describes the Sardinian landscapes bring to mind the untamed talent of a painter with a strong, imaginative, wild, and symbolic stroke. Deledda's verism, in this sense, has a poetic breath that compensates for the brutality of an often miserable world populated by characters who fight, insult each other, drink, curse, and commit suicide.The dramatic core of the plot is a classic of 19th-century literature, and it attempts to answer the following question: how can a child of guilt, a bastard son of an already married father and a mother who abandons him as a child, make himself worthy of a respectable life? The protagonist's adventure, Annania, who through the blows of fortune and thanks to a benefactor goes from rural Sardinia to the city of Cagliari and, afterwards, to the continent and Rome, resonates with Balzacian and Stendhalian echoes. Deledda, however, ensures that he never fully sheds either Sardinian reality or his Sardinian condition: the weight of inherited guilt, the sense of honor and dishonor, primal passions, the present as a projection of old atavisms, life as fate... Reading Deledda reminds us that true literature can spring from European capitals as well as from small villages on the most remote islands.

]]>

"I'm sure you've all wondered at some point how to pronounce my friend László's surname," began translator and writer Adan Kovacsics, with a friendly smile, sitting next to the latest Nobel laureate in literature. "I have the answer," he continued. "It has to be separated into two parts, kraszna and horkaiIt is a word of Slavic origin: krasny It means pretty, and horkai, hill." The "pretty hill" that is László Krasznahorkai He was also smiling on Wednesday night at the CCCB while his friend assured everyone that the work of the author of Satanic Tango and Melancholy of resistance It connects with great classics like Dostoevsky and Kafka and broadens the spectrum of the contemporary novel thanks to its demanding nature, both in form and content.

]]>

The joy with which László Krasznahorkai (Gyula, 1954) received the news of the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, which was quickly tinged with anguish. "Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me: they congratulated me, asked for interviews, even though many of those journalists had never read me, and I even received a letter from the town where I was born inviting me to pay for a new wooden bridge they needed," he recalls in Barcelona, ​​months later. "All I wanted was to disappear," he insists. He couldn't make that dream a reality until January, shortly after delivering his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, in which, starting from the desire to address "hope," he ended up recounting a personal anecdote from the Berlin subway in the early 1990s: a homeless man appeared, struggling to urinate in a corner, and, unaware of his infraction, was chased after to stop him.

]]>

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, a master of European cinema, has died at the age of seventy, a premature age (especially at a time when some of the world's despots, like Putin and Xi Jinping, converse before the Forbidden City about the age-old chimera of immortality, so beloved by tyrants). Tarr's cinema is lyrical and stark, visually hypnotic, and narratively characterized by a masterful command of ellipsis and off-screen space. His stories often appear to be almost non-stories, barely formulated situations. But from minimal elements, his films offer a harsh yet compassionate perspective on humanity and the world.

]]>

In a time and world dominated by algorithms and the pathological desire to accumulate money, a time that generates a word as frightening as monetizeThe awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai has pleased those who still want—we still want—to believe in literature as a place of resistance. Resistance against what or whom, you might ask? Well, resistance against charlatans and charlatans. Against cynics, impostors, opportunists. Of course, against authoritarians and champions of false freedoms.

]]>

While the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature was announced on Thursday, László Krasznahorkai, another award winner, Abdulrazak Gurnah, spoke to journalists from a hotel in Barcelona to talk about his new novel, A long road (Salamander). Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and has lived in London for over 40 years, was awarded the prize in 2021. The jury valued his work because it takes a "rigorous and moving approach to the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees at the intersection of cultures and continents." A long road, the first novel he's published since being chosen by the Swedish Academy in 2021, tells of the friendship between three young people in 1990s Zanzibar who, from very different backgrounds, try to escape.

]]>

The Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, author of novels such as Satanic Tango –available in Catalan from Edicions del Cràter, translated by Carles Dachs– has just been proclaimed the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "exciting and visionary work, which, amidst apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art." Krasznahorkai, who was praised by the Swedish Academy this Thursday as one of the heirs "of the burlesque absurdity that ranges from Franz Kafka to Thomas Bernhard," is one of the headliners of the Kosmopolis festival and is scheduled to visit Barcelona on October 24, where he will converse with Mique at the CCCB.

]]>

Mario Vargas Llosa died this Sunday in Lima (Peru) at the age of 89. The Spanish-Peruvian writer Nobel Prize in Literature He died "surrounded by his family and in peace," according to a message posted on social media to his children. "His farewell will sadden his relatives, friends and readers around the world, but we hope that they will find solace, as we did, in the fact that he lived a long, varied and fruitful life, and that he left behind a body of work that will outlive him," the prolific author's children noted. They also announced that the farewell ceremony will be held in strict privacy, without any public ceremony.

]]>

This is the last novel translated into Catalan by the winner of the last Nobel Prize for Literature, South Korean writer Han KangA book that relates to all of the author's books, but especially to Human acts, because it also delves—with as much force as delicacy—into the traumatic past of Korean history. In this case, the bloody episode at the heart of it all is a massacre that took place on Jeju Island, in the northernmost part of the country, in which more than ten thousand people were murdered. It was a true barbarity perpetrated by police and military personnel against a popular uprising of peasants who rejected the division of Korea into two countries. It was 1948, and some historians place this episode as one of the preludes to the Korean War, which began two years later. Needless to say, the entire massacre took place with the knowledge of the US Army, which already controlled the territory.

]]>