A claim by women and especially those of the generation born in the fifties has helped Gemma Ruiz to win the Sant Jordi award with Les nostres mares. She is the first woman in 19 years to win it, since Carme Riera won it with La meitat de l'ànima, in 2003, and Ruiz did not want to let the opportunity pass without claiming the fracture of this glass ceiling and has started the acceptance speech citing the Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux because she does not feel the award as "an individual victory but a collective one".
After reporting that "the virus of phallocracy has infected everything to the point that a prize as beloved as this one has lived ass to reality", Ruiz has reminded his predecessors Català, Rodoreda, Capmany, Roig and Marçal, wanted to point out, as if it were a football line-up on a day like today, "those who walk by my side, the mirrors and the spur: Cadenas, El Hachmi, Rojals, Solà, Orriols, Cabré-Verdiell, Riera, Ballbona, Pujades, Kremser, Vallès, Punsoda, Bendicho, Espasa, Piqué, Solsona, Baltasar, Barbal, Carnicero, Ibarz, Ramis, Codony, Díaz, Gurt, and the ones I leave!”
In her novel, up to ten characters from different generations, origins and social classes are intertwined in a leap back from the present to the youth of the protagonists, who strive to get ahead despite the difficulties of the time.
After the revelation of Argelagues in 2016 and Ca la Wenling in 2020, this third novel by the TV3 news editor-in-chief has given her her first award and takes home the 60,000-euro endowment. The book will be published by Proa in February.
During this 72nd Nit de Santa Llúcia, the Festa Òmnium de les Lletres Catalanes, the Carles Riba poetry prize was also awarded, which went to the collection of poems Un llum que crema, by Jordi Llavina, for whom the book obeys "the need for refuge, for that clarity that is not overwhelming", to seek "wisdom not grandiloquent", from details of reality and extract moral and aesthetic lessons. Unlike his recent books, here he moves away from the long narrative poem, from the "dramatic monologue" to return to shorter poems, as in older books but with the years added and the concept of resistance gaining weight.
The Mercè Rodoreda award for short stories and narrations has been for the first book by Marc Vintró Castells, Unes ganes salvatges de cridar, nine stories from different genres ranging from dystopian science fiction to realism to deal with the "contained rage that we have inside". a “drowning world that causes discomfort”, with stoic and dark characters trying to survive “a world that is as it is”. For Vintró, "behind each story is the idea of metaphorically returning to the forest."
The first prize of the night was the Joaquim Ruyra for youth narrative, which was won by Gerard Guix with Un far a la fi del món, in which a 14-year-old boy settles with his family on an island where the internet hardly exists, a novel that according to the jury "explores the universe of adolescent relationships with sensitivity and humor", and in which the author has tried to "pause time and provide a beautiful space where there can be reflection". The new label of the Enciclopèdia Elastic Books group will publish it next March. The Josep M. Folch i Torres award has been declared void.
During the gala, presented as a competition by Roger Coma - and with the presence among other authorities of the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès; the Ministers of Culture, Natàlia Garriga; of Education, Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray, and of Social Rights, Carles Campuzano; as well as the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau–, the president of Òmnium, Xavier Antich, praised the book, "a passport in all parts and without an expiration date", and recalled that "Catalan is the only language with a community of ten million people without a state that defends it, but a state against it", to add that "the best way to defend the language is to share it".
The International Joan B. Cendrós prize was also awarded to the translator Mara Faye Lethem (she translated into English works by Irene Solà, Jaume Cabré, Alícia Kopf, Albert Sánchez Piñol or Marta Orriols) and the Muriel Casals prize of communication, which has been for the correspondent of TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio in Russia Manel Alias, especially for his coverage of the war in Ukraine.
Catalan version, here
