Year after year the Catalan Book Week It continues to grow: each edition—this year's will mark its 43rd—increases visitors and surpasses sales from the previous one. With last year's change of location, from the Muelle de la Madera to Passeig Lluís Companys, the Week broke the bad omens (it left the old port of Barcelona and was delayed a few weeks due to the America's Cup) and managed to break its own record once again: it almost doubled its attendance, going from 0,000 to 20% more than in 2023, which meant going from 600,000 to 720,000 euros.

How would you feel if you were to agree on an amnesty law, the law were to be approved, a year later it was still not fully applied, the Constitutional Court was about to say that it was constitutional and, even so, it was not applied to you because the Supreme Court went so far as to fabricate that you had been charged with embezzlement – that there was no amnesty –, everyone would wait to see what the European Court of Human Rights would say about all this and years would go by? without the amnesty being applied to him? (And excuse the length of the question.)

Throughout almost six decades of awards, the Honorary Prize for Catalan Literature has distinguished narrators, poets, linguists, singer-songwriters and historians, but until now it had not recognized anyone who had dedicated his life to philosophy as Pere Lluís FontLluís's intellectual contribution has been deployed, broadly speaking, on four levels: university teaching, translation, publishing, and writing. "To think is to rethink." "Catalonia and philosophy have been my two passions." "We are monolingual, but it suits us to be polyglots." These have been three of the award winner's mottos throughout his long and fruitful career.

The way literature is going here and almost everywhere these days, no better candidate could be chosen for the Honorary Prize for Catalan Literature than Pere Lluís Font, man liberal, prudent and wise, as it is said of the Count of Almaviva at Marriage of Figaro, by Mozart. It's not that in other competitions the prize was awarded to some Cherubino, who is a mischievous young man who has yet to do anything notable. It's not that: the prize has gone to a man who has worked his entire life to ennoble the philosophical landscape in Catalonia: Catalan philosophy It cannot be said that we have had, nor would it be understood, just as it is not understood that there could be Catalan mathematics. Not everything can carry that adjective, and that is what the prestige of the homeland ultimately consists of.

It is excellent news to be awarded the Honorary Prize for Catalan Literature in Pere Lluís Font, a thinker who personifies the conviction that rigor is a form of courtesy towards fellow citizens: this can be seen in the interview which Ignasi Aragay writes in this diary, a piece that he enjoys reading.

Pere Lluís Font (Pujalt, 1934), historian of philosophy, at the age of 91 maintains an enviable lucidity and intellectual vitality. A teacher of several generations of philosophers, he has just published the Catalan translation of the Essential poems (Excerpt) by Saint John of the Cross, which have a mystical and erotic interpretation. And he concludes the essay Philosophy in nature (UB), "a text that is not at all emphatic, without makeup or rhetoric", like three of the great authors who have always accompanied him: Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal. In fact, his last major contribution (2021) has been the monumental translation into Catalan of the Thoughts Pascal, winner of the National Translation Prize and the Catalan PEN Club Prize.