The best-endowed literary prize in the world – a little more than the Nobel – already has a winner in 2023: Sonsoles Ónega (Madrid, 1977). This is the year of the writer and television presenter. If, on the one hand, viewers have made her program Y Ahora Sonsoles – on Antena 3, the Planeta group's television – the most watched of its time slot, overtaking the veteran Ana Rosa Quintana, tonight the jury of the Planeta award will has awarded the award of one million euros for the work The Maid's Daughters. The finalist was Alfonso Goizueta Alfaro (Madrid, 1999) with the historical novel La sangre del padre, focused on the figure of Alexander the Great.
The name of the winner was made public during a dinner at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC) on the same day that marked the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Italo Calvino in Havana.
“I thought I had already done the most difficult live shows of my life but it is clear that I still had something nice in store and I confess that this is the most difficult,” admitted the author, who dedicated the award to writers with children and to the children of the writers. Ónega announced that “there is a literary substrate that always accompanies me, destiny” and that it is also present in her new novel. “This is a novel about brave women who fought at sea and worked the sea for a hundred years without recognition” and who “are finally going to have it.”
He also spoke about the importance of reading. “Eighteen years have passed since my first novel. It is a story of accumulated failures, I have lost most of the awards and I have won this very important one. I think we are the books we have read. We will only make a better world if we feed this with books. There is no citizen better armed against abuses and powers than a well-read citizen.”
The story of The Maid's Daughters takes place between Galicia and exotic Cuba and covers the first two thirds of the 20th century with the help of a family of Galician businessmen, the Valdés. The novel highlights the struggle and enterprise of the women of the clan, who created an entire canning empire in their homeland, but whose lives were forever marked by a terrible secret.
It all goes back to the past, with an exchange of babies, that of the maid and that of the lady of the manor where she works, both from the same father, the owner of the farm. An exchange with which the servant intends nothing more than to give a better life and with more luxuries to her true firstborn.
The Planet is a recognition that allows Ónega to take a huge leap in her dimension as a literary author. After discreet beginnings commercially, her career catapulted when she won the Fernando Lara award in 2017 with After Love, a novel in which she told the real love story between Carmen Trilla and Frederic Escofet, the Republican soldier who served Macià and Companys and who was sentenced to death by the Fets d'Octubre, although the sentence would not be carried out.
“The award restored me to the literary world in which, honestly, I had not had much fortune until that moment. I had three novels that did not cover advances of 1,000 or 3,000 euros of the little they sold,” he acknowledged then. In his prose he also hinted at his interest in female characters because, as he explained to La Vanguardia, “I wanted to focus on her, Carmen Trilla, known for her elegance and beauty as 'the Greta Garbo of Barcelona' in the 1930s.” .
Love was also the main driving force of another later title, A Thousand Forbidden Kisses (2020), in which a woman marked by loss and a priest in crisis rebel against their greatest obstacle: the strength of their passion. “My idea was to create a story that would allow the reader to believe in love again in times when relationships last as long as they last.”
One of the reasons that, he stated, can lead to disagreements is “the lack of conciliation between personal and work life”, a topic that he addressed in the previous Nosotras que lo quimos todo (2015) in which Beatriz, purchasing director at a multinational, receives a promising professional offer. Ónega may now have to rescue those reflections, which will surely help her find a balance between the sets and the work that comes with being the winner of the Planeta award, including a tour of Spain.
Sonsoles Ónega is the daughter of journalist Fernando Ónega – a habitual signing of La Vanguardia –, and adds her name to those of Luz Gabas (2022), Carmen Mola (2021), Eva Garcia Saenz de Urturi (2020), Javier Cercas (2019) or Santiago Posteguillo (2018), the recent winners. And now Sonsoles.
Alfonso Goizueta, for his part, was proclaimed a finalist (which entails 200,000 euros) with The Blood of the Father, a historical novel focused on the young Alexander the Great who, after the murder of his father, undertakes an expedition to Persia in order to free people from barbarism. An objective that is altered after several expeditions and battles until it becomes pure ambition.
“I started writing this novel during the pandemic,” Goizueta said last night, when taking the stand, “I decided to write a story about Alejandro, but my grandfather told me that Alejandro didn't fit into a story, so I made him a novel, which I It took three years. Beyond the battles and intrigue, what interested me was the story of this boy who was my age, 23 years old, an initiatory journey of someone who grows older, how his conception of politics and friendship changes. I'm looking for the man
behind the myth, the guy who leaves his house looking for himself, an unrepeatable character in history.”
Despite his youth, Goizueta is the author of several books: the essays Limitando el poder (2017) – where he analyzes the changes in international relations between 1871 and 1939 – and The last rulers of Castile (2019) – about the figures of Isabel the Catholic, Cardinal Cisneros and Isabel of Portugal – and the novels The Greenhouses of Sal Gema (2016), a story of fantasy and magic during the Second World War, and Corazón deidades (2020), adventures starring the Greek gods. Today he adds to all this a new book that will change his life.
