The Omnium award for Best Novel of the Year already has three finalists: Ràbia (Proa), by Sebastià Alzamora; At the lake (Columna), by Maria Barbal, and Les heights (Empúries), by Sebastià Portell. They are the selection of the jury formed by Oriol Izquierdo, Marta Pessarrodona, Xavier Pla, Neus Real and Marta Segarra, who have left by the wayside the bet that had been made in the first selection for debutantes (Aioua, by Roser Cabré-Verdiell ; Dystocia, by Pilar Codony; Nicolau, by Antoni Veciana, and Els dies bons, by Aina Fullana) or for another of the surprises of the year, the Guilleries by Ferran Garcia (in addition to Benvingut by Empar Moliner and El monstre de Santa Helena by Albert Sánchez Piñol).
The winner of the award for the best novel published between November 2021 and October 2022 – endowed with 25,000 euros, like the Finestres, although in the case of Òmnium they are divided into €20,000 for the author and €5,000 for dissemination – the next January 26, and it will be decided by the same jury.
For the entity's president, Xavier Antich, “the works of Alzamora, Barbal and Portell show the immense power and great wealth of Catalan literature and culture. We need to continue working for the prestige of Catalan letters and the promotion of creators, artists, writers and professionals from the world of arts everywhere, because they represent the best of our future”.
The Òmnium award for the best novel of the year was born in 2017 inspired by other awards for published works such as Goncourt and Booker, and since then it has been won by Raül Garrigasait, Marta Orriols, Martí Domínguez, Eva Baltasar and, last year , Joan-Lluís Lluís.
And if the two previous calls had been won by books published by Club Editor -of which this year no work was selected-, the three finalists of this call have been published by Grup 62.
The evaluation of the jury
About the work Ràbia, by Sebastià Alzamora (Proa), the jury says that "he achieves the rare prodigy, in barely more than two hundred pages, and with a range of topics as topical as gender violence, for example, or so present still like the Spanish Civil War, to make us see the banality of the evil that, in his case, is concentrated in the protagonist's bitch, a former writer”.
About Allac, by Maria Barbal (Columna), he writes that “it is a fractal novel in which water, following the words of Virginia Woolf that head it, floats and sets sail not only thoughts but above all murky relationships of a group of friends under the gaze of a teenager about to enter adulthood. The llac becomes a metaphor for lost happiness, but, at the same time, each of the stones thrown into its waters makes a surface that is not only one of happiness and harmony tremble to infinity”.
With regard to Les altures, by Sebastià Portell (Empúries), he assures that “it recovers a Catalan artistic figure that is not sufficiently recognized, the sculptor Ismael Smith, with an original and daring fictionalized biography that hides more than it shows. With a wide game of both voices and looks, the author reconstructs the identity of an artist, with all its tensions, which is also a personal and collective self-portrait that everyone can see reflected”.
Catalan version, here
