Chilean-American author Isabel Allende has won Spain’s €1 million (£843,000) Planeta Prize, one of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes, under a pseudonym, with a sequel to her celebrated first novel, The House of the Spirits. Allende, 84, won the 75th edition of the award on Thursday with The Hour Before Dawn, which revisits the characters of his 1982 novel, a multigenerational family saga confronted with politics. agitation in a country inspired by Chile. The new 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 that the book would close the universe of The House of the Spirits. The 1982 novel is often read alongside Fortune’s Daughter 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 participated in a competition because I wanted to avoid the embarrassment of coming last,” she said. “At my age, there is very little to lose.” He said decades of readers had asked him to write the sequel, asking what happened to Alba. He 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, her father’s cousin. Allende had been the first democratically elected Marxist leader in Latin America. Under the Pinochet regime, an estimated 40,000 people were tortured and more than 3,000 murdered. “Now that I see so many democracies threatened by authoritarianism, extreme nationalism and even fascism, I feel again the fear that led me to leave my country,” he 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 have been translated into more than 40 languages. The award is open to unpublished manuscripts, with the option of submitting under a pseudonym, and Allende participated under the name Luz Ventura, with the fictitious title Los que missinges. However, the judges may have been able to capture Allende’s style. “I would be very surprised if the judges did not know that it was Isabel Allende,” said Professor Duncan Wheeler, professor of Spanish studies at the University of Leeds and president-elect of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland. “It must be taken into account that the Planeta award is one of the most generously remunerated in the Spanish-speaking world, but certainly not the most prestigious.” The award has sometimes come under criticism for the choice of the winner. In 2021, the award went to The Beast, a thriller published under the pseudonym Carmen Mola, which had been marketed as the identity of an author. At the awards ceremony it was revealed that Mola were actually three writers: Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez and Antonio Mercero. The award is managed by Planeta, one of the largest Spanish-speaking publishing groups, and includes the condition that the winning book be published by them. Allende has been published by Plaza & Janés, an imprint of Penguin Random House, since La Casa de los Espíritus, so this marks an important achievement for Planeta. Despite the option to submit under a pseudonym, the award has a history of favoring established writers and television figures: previous winners of the award include prominent Spanish-language authors such as Juan Marsé and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, and the controversial television personality Juan de Val. When asked about the perceived trend of awarding the prize to Characters known for appearing on television programmes, José Creuheras, president of the Planeta Group, said, according to the 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. We have some of the biggest names in contemporary literature among our winners and finalists. The scope of the prize, measured by the numbers, speaks for itself, and the number of people who are interested in the Planet is growing.” Spanish writer and screenwriter Sergio Hernández, whose historical novel La Añoranza won 200,000 euros.
