Chilean-American author Isabel Allende has pseudonymously won Spain’s €1 million (£843,000) Premio Planeta, one of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes, with a sequel to her famous debut novel, The House of the Spirits.
Allende, 84, won the 75th edition of the prize on Thursday with The hour before the treewhich returns to the characters of his 1982 novel, a multigenerational family saga facing the political upheavals of a country inspired by Chile.
The new The story follows Alba, the granddaughter of Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle, as she tries to recover from imprisonment and torture during the Pinochet dictatorship, according to Reuters. Allende said the book would bring an end to the Spirit House universe. The 1982 novel is often read alongside Daughter of Fortune and Portrait in Sepia as part of a loose trilogy of interconnected family sagas.
Speaking at the awards ceremony in Barcelona, attended by King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, Allende said it was “like winning the Nobel”.
“I had never competed because I wanted to avoid the embarrassment of finishing last,” she said. “At my age, there’s very little to lose.”
She said she was prompted to write the sequel by decades of readers wondering what happened to Alba. She also drew parallels between the political circumstances surrounding the novel and the contemporary rise of extremism. Allende was forced into exile after the 1973 military coup led by Augusto Pinochet that overthrew Chilean President Salvador Allende, a cousin of her father. Allende had been Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist leader. Under Pinochet’s regime, an estimated 40,000 people were tortured and more than 3,000 killed.
“Now that I see so many democracies threatened by authoritarianism, extreme nationalism and even fascism, I feel again the fear that drove me to leave my country,” she said.
Allende is one of the best-known writers in the Spanish-speaking world, whose books have sold more than 80 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 40 languages. The prize is open to unpublished manuscripts, with the possibility of submitting them under a pseudonym, and Allende is entered under the name Luz Ventura, with the fictional title Los que fatan.
However, the judges may have been able to pick out Allende’s style. “I would be very surprised if the judges didn’t know it was Isabel Allende,” said Professor Duncan Wheeler, chair of Spanish studies at the University of Leeds and president-elect of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland. “It should be kept in mind that the Planeta Prize is one of the most generously paid in the Spanish-speaking world, but certainly not the most prestigious. »
The award has sometimes faced criticism over the choice of winner. In 2021, the prize was awarded to The beasta thriller published under the pseudonym Carmen Mola, which had been marketed as the identity of a female author. During the awards ceremony, it was revealed that Mola was actually three male writers: Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez and Antonio Mercero.
The prize is organized by Planeta, one of the largest publishing groups in the Spanish-speaking world, and carries the condition that the winning book be published by them. Allende is published by Plaza & Janés, an imprint of Penguin Random House, from La Maison des Esprits, which therefore marks a significant coup for Planeta.
Despite the option of submitting under a pseudonym, the prize has historically favored established writers and television personalities: past winners of the prize include prominent Spanish-language authors such as Juan Marsé and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, as well as the controversial television personality Juan de Val.
Asked about the perceived trend of awarding the prize to figures known for appearing on television shows, José Creuheras, president of the Planeta group, said, according to Spanish newspaper El País: “I am not in a position to say whether the Planeta Prize has more or less prestige than in the past. Among our winners and finalists we count some of the biggest names in contemporary literature. The reach of the prize, measured by the numbers, speaks for itself, and the number of people who participated interest in Planeta increases.
The finalist was Spanish writer and screenwriter Sergio Hernández, whose historical novel La añoranza won €200,000.
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