The 2026 Cervantes Prize winner, Cristina Fernández Cubas, appears with a light step, a long trench coat, and her usual sober elegance at La Casa del Llibre on the Rambla de Catalunya in Barcelona. It has been only a few hours since she received the call from the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, who explains that it caught her off guard, in the middle of watching a movie, after a morning of doctor's appointments. She says she responded unpleasantly: "I was stunned, speechless." Immediately, her phone was overwhelmed with congratulations. "Yesterday I was a zombie all day and today my feet are back on the ground," she asserts.

The title of the new book by Cristina Fernández Cubas (Arenys de Mar, 1945) summarizes one of the vocations of his literature: to show what remains hidden, the mystery that beats on the margins of official stories. What is not coming (Tusquets) includes half a dozen new stories by the Catalan writer, who has been distinguished over the last decade with the Critics' Prize (2015), the National Fiction Prize (2016) and the National Literature Prize (2023). "When they called me to notify me of this latest award, I thought they had made a mistake because I already had it, but I was the one who was wrong," she admits with a smile. Fernández Cubas is not very prolific, but she doesn't want this collection to be the last and already has a new project in hand: "Some weird science fiction, the kind that only I would be interested in writing."