In the Planeta Awards, the mystery is not always between the pages of a novel. Sometimes it starts with the signature. The game of pseudonyms has become one of the great attractions of the award: behind an invented name can hide both a novice author and a consecrated figure, and discovering their identity is part of the expectation surrounding the gala. In 2021, the pseudonym Carmen Mola revealed the identity of three writers: Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez, and Antonio Mercero. This year, few could imagine that behind Luz Ventura was Isabel Allende, one of the most widely read living Spanish-language writers in the world, who has won the Planeta thanks to the prequel to La casa de los espíritus, the novel she published more than four decades ago and which has become a classic of universal literature.
Allende's revelation has also served to celebrate a round number: the 75 editions of an award whose endowment now reaches one million euros, placing it among the best-paid literary awards in the world. An amount that equals that of the recently created Aena Award for Hispanic American Narrative, although the latter recognizes already published works.
Allende's choice also draws a different profile from other recent Planeta winners with a marked media presence, such as Juan del Val, winner in 2025 with Vera, una historia de amor. On this occasion, the focus is on an author with a consolidated international career and on a work that connects with one of the most emblematic titles of her career. With this recognition, Allende joins a list of winners that includes great names in Spanish literature, such as Juan Marsé and Ana María Matute, and revives a novel that has already become a classic.
Thus, in La hora antes del alba —the novel with which she won the Planeta Award—, Allende resumes the story of Alba Trueba, granddaughter of the patriarch of La casa de los espíritus. After being imprisoned and tortured during the Chilean dictatorship, the protagonist returns pregnant to the family home. From there, she reconstructs her life and becomes a witness to an era marked by repression, fear, and the wounds left by political violence.
Even though these are independent works, Allende had been thinking for decades about resuming Alba's story, partly due to readers' questions about the character's fate. Returning to the Trueba family allows her to revisit some of the central themes of her literature, such as memory, exile, and the wounds of repression, this time from the perspective of a woman trying to reconstruct her life and bear witness to what happened.
The writer also explained, while collecting the award, why she had decided to enter the Planeta, something she had not done until now. "I had never entered an award to avoid the humiliation of being at the bottom of the list," she joked during the gala. At 84 years old, she assured, it was time to take the risk.
Allende's victory also has a geographical dimension: twelve years after the Mexican Jorge Zepeda Patterson won the award with Milena o el fémur más bonito del mundo, in 2014, the Planeta once again distinguishes a Latin American author. But the result also has another reading, this time editorial. Allende has been linked for decades to Plaza & Janés, an imprint belonging to Penguin Random House, since she published La casa de los espíritus in 1982. With the Planeta, her new novel moves to the catalog of a competing group. Although the award does not necessarily imply the transfer of all her previous work, it does incorporate one of the most recognized authors of literature in Spanish into Planeta's catalog.
The writer collected the award during a multitudinous dinner, presided over by the King and Queen and with nearly 1,300 guests. The celebration also premiered a new venue: instead of the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), the usual venue for the gala, the organization moved the ceremony to pavilion 1 of the Montjuïc venue of Fira de Barcelona, due to the high demand for attendance. A gathering that served to commemorate the 75 years of an award created in 1952 by the editor José Manuel Lara Hernández and transformed, over the decades, into one of the great events of the Spanish literary calendar.
Sergio Hernández rescues post-war Barcelona in La añoranza
In addition to Allende, the gala had another prominent name: Sergio Hernández, finalist for the award with La añoranza, a historical novel set in Barcelona in the late 1950s, and who receives 200,000 euros. The plot follows a woman who falls in love with a French translator who disappears without a trace. Years later, she discovers a police report linking him to a plan to assassinate Antonio Machado. The novel thus combines intrigue with the memory of an era marked by the consequences of the Civil War and Francoist repression.