A total of 1,424 novels were hoping to win the 75th Planeta award until a few minutes ago, when the publisher announced, in a press conference at the Palau de la Música, which are the ten finalist works that the jury will take into account in the final deliberation, which will be made public during a dinner at Pavilion 1 of the Fira de Barcelona, in Montjuïc. "We can only be grateful to all those who have entrusted us with their most precious treasure, the effort of their creativity –assured José Creuheras, current president of Grupo Planeta–. Our great aspiration is to give maximum popularity to the winning work, regardless of the critical reception the books may have, which are ultimately endorsed by the response of the readers, which is very high and has increased in recent editions".

The AI has received its first Planeta award tonight in Barcelona. But it is not, in this case, a machine capable of generating a novel that has deceived the jury, but the initials of the winning author, Isabel Allende, the best-selling living novelist in Hispanic literature, with more than 80 million copies sold. The 84-year-old Chilean author entered the 75th edition of one of the best-endowed literary awards – surpassed by very little by the Nobel Prize, which offered 1.1 million euros to the winner, Anne Carson– to culminate her extensive career and star in an editorial scandal: Isabel Allende is changing houses.

Andrés Villena (Elx, 1980) has spent years investigating business lobbies, family sagas, banks, and institutions to be able to x-ray the structure and functioning of the Spanish elite. The result is Las élites que dominan España,a book that was to be published by Planeta, which finally backed out, and has ended up being published by Libros del K.O. 

The other day, at a book launch, I attended a conversation between three independent publishers who discussed with concern and helplessness the changes the Catalan publishing market has been undergoing recently. And perhaps global sales figures have indeed grown., but for whom have they grown? One of the editors explained that, in her case, for example, the supposedly glorious day of Sant Jordi sold half as many as last year. Not ten or twenty percent less, no: fifty percent. Another commented that the average sales figures for each title were around 400 copies. A third told me on the phone that their sales this year as a whole are thirty-five percent down. So when we say that Sant Jordi went very well, we should specify who it went well for.