There are more than 200 846 novels from 2021 submitted for an “absolute record” for the Planeta Prize this year. This was highlighted yesterday on the eve of the award decision by José Creuheras, head of the publishing group, awarding one million euros to the winner and 200,000 to the finalist, making it the best endowed literary prize in the world.
As jury president Juan Eslava Galán will announce the decision between nine tonight, it’s an imposition of historical fiction and noir novel against the costume theme and the Civil War, although it has a very diverse theme. The finalist stories were eliminated because one had already been published, instead of the usual ten stories.
“The historical novel, from the 60s of the 20th century to the first years of Christianity, is carried on in a temporal spectrum as wide as the detective novel. There is a genre of social novel that examines changes in today’s society, particularly what it has to do with women’s empowerment.
According to Creuheras, the fact that the Planeta Prize has sold 44.5 million copies over its long history confirms the book’s founding purpose.
Finalists include a fictional biography of Frida Khalo and Marilyn Monroe by José Manuel Mata Muñoz; A novel of intrigue entitled Feathers and Sand; The story of María Magdalena, “an independent woman in the world of men” drew attention to Eslava Galán; or the experience of four women in the face of cheating on my wife’s boyfriend. Deception is also the theme of over 7,000 miles and a traditional noir, the City of Illusions; and Up the River is an epic about the colonization of Louisiana in the 18th century.
Nazism appears in The Führer’s Weaknesses and The Harpist. The first is about a Jewish veterinarian who experiments with the breed of German shepherd for Hitler, and the second is about an intrigue with the Nazis.
The jury consists of José Manuel Blecua, Fernando Delgado, Juan Eslava Galán, Pere Gimferrer, Carmen Posadas, Rosa Regàs and Belén López.
buying a book
The president of Grupo Planeta states that “seven out of 10 readers buy books from bookstores; read more, reading increased by an average of 2% and 76% of Spaniards read regularly (1 book per month, especially young readers)».
In an analysis of the book’s behavior since the pandemic, Jesús Badenes, director of the Planeta Bookstore space, noted that “in all countries around us a growth of between 15 and 25 percent has been consolidated, with 16 percent in cases. of Spain”.
Planeta’s administrators were in favor of government measures such as the cultural bonus, the extension of it over time or the simplification of the requirements for claiming it, resulting in “the book occupies the space of centrality it deserves”.
Badenes expressed his satisfaction, saying that “the phenomenon of piracy is not decreasing as much as it is in France or Germany, but is not increasing.”
Source: Informacion
