Euphoria on the eve of the celebration of the Planeta Award: The Director General of the Editorial Group, José Creuheras, has announced that the best-endowed prize of the Spanish letters considerably increases its amount and will pass from the 600,000 euros to one million in this edition. The finalist goes from 150,000 euros to 200,000 euros. In this way, the award surpasses the Nobel of Literature, which gives its winner 990,000 euros and thus becomes the best endowed in the world.
The change has been announced by surprise this Thursday at La Llotja de Mar in Barcelona. That figure did not consist of the current bases of the award, but as you have affirmed Creuheras, "we believe that the winner will not complain." The award is 70 years old with a dancer of winners in which they appear from Ana María Matute to Eduardo Mendoza, passing through Javier Fences and Round Dolores. To the delivery ceremony morning Friday, the first one that will be held almost full normally after the pandemic, is expected to come to the kings.
The notorious increase of the prize, whose endowment rises 40%, responds Alclima de Euphoria that reigns in the Spanish publishing world, a reality that has already advanced in the past Forum Edita a few weeks ago: Spaniards have spent more in books this 2020 (Confinement included) that in 2019 and the buoyant figures of this 2021, two and a half months of the end of the year, they speak of the best exercise of the decade in the Spanish publishing world since 2013.
It has also been the case in the planet group. "We have had a growth figures of 15% over last year and 30% compared to 2019," explained Jesus Badennes, director of the Book area of Planeta, "with a market very different from 2013". What have the likes of the Spaniards changed when reading? Today, the comic, the fantastic and evasion and the novel and youthful novel triumph succeed much more. Badenes has celebrated the new online sales platforms of books created by bookstores to compete with Amazon, Book Casa, FNAC and English Court and has pointed out that despite the bonding of online commerce (23%), 70% of books in Spain keep buying in bookstores and paper.
For Creuheras, this planet prize gala supposes a "celebration back to normal" after two complicated years. "We have all go through difficult family circumstances, some also at a professional level, but finally we see the light." That of this edition will be a special appointment because the prize turns seven decades: Juan José Mira was his first winner in 1952 (40,000 pesetas was the provision of the prize at that time) and since then they have gained writers who are already part of the Spanish literature And what planet has gathered in a commemorative video that will be seen tomorrow Friday at dinner and the delivery gala.
He parade from Ana María Matute, who defined the prize as "a Bullfit" in the Spanish cultural panorama to Eduardo Mendoza, who describes it as "a circus, in the good sense of the word". "The Planeta Award is something that when you start writing you think that only happens to others," says Lorenzo Silva. For Round Dolores, it is a prize that "has all society assumed, just like Christmas, summer and spring." Creuffras figure at 44 million the copies of books sold in these seven decades, "what is equivalent to, considering that in Spain there are 18 million households, about two planet and average prizes per house," she summed up.
In this edition the record of manuscripts presented, 654, the majority (389) of Spain, with Madrid at the head, has been renewed: 79 aspirants are from the capital versus 53 in Barcelona. Maybe that's why Madrid appears several times in the small synopses of the ten finalists that the jury has briefly commented (all with pseudonym): there is a thriller located in the middle of cholera in 1838, a police novel on the corruption set in El Madrid de The 80s and the history of a widower of Atocha attacks that tries to rebuild his life.
Date Of Update: 15 October 2021, 10:45
