The press conference for the Planeta award always has something of a big party: one year they fill the Cervantes Institute and, the next, the RAE. “It is an honor to be on this stage,” those involved repeated, as if underlining the status of a great spectacle or representation. A portrait of Cervantes presided over the party. Before starting, José Crehueras, president of the Planeta group, recalled the founding objective of the label: “Give the book maximum dissemination.” And he gave the data that summarized the success: the billion books sold (“more or less”) in the seventy-five years of the publisher’s history.
Then it was the turn of the protagonists of 2024: Paloma Sánchez-Garnica, winner of the award with ‘Vitoria’, and Beatriz Serrano, finalist with ‘Fuego en la guerra’. The presenter of the event, Cristina Villanueva, stated that her novels were very different, but that they had something in common: their female characters, those women who try to survive, find a place.
So in ‘Vitoria’ we have the story of a woman in defeated Berlin after the Second World War who makes a living singing and creating a powerful message encryption system: there is a not very veiled tribute to Hedy Lamarr, inventor of the protowifi. And in ‘Fire in the Throat’ we find a mother who, in the nineties, leaves her family.
Sánchez-Garnica spoke of the value of reading to “make us more tolerant.” Also about the parallelism between Nazism and the segregationist laws of the United States, very present in her book: «In ‘Last Days in Berlin’ I was very focused on the consequences of Nazism and I realized that on the other side of the Atlantic, in a democratic country, there were laws that were an attack on the human rights of a part of society because of their skin color. Or because of their way of thinking, as happened in McCarthyism… We think that all the horror is on one side and we forget what there is in democracies, which are always imperfect and in which attacks against human rights can occur. .
Is there a parallel between McCarthyism and today’s world? Villanueva asked. «Journalism has a very important power. And there is journalism that can encourage that house of witches against those who do not think alike. And then there is journalism that confronts power, that doubts power, that takes risks to tell the truth. “That’s what fascinates me about the world of journalism.”
Serrano spoke of his interest in the figure of the ‘outsider’, who deep down we all are from a certain point of view. “I am interested in characters who are on the margins of society, who are directly outside the norm,” he stressed. And he pointed out as inspirations ‘The Frozen Woman’, by Annie Ernaux, and ‘The Abandoners’, by Begoña Gómez Urzaiz, where he read a phrase that became the book’s mantra: “A man leaves, a woman abandons.”
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