Joan-Lluís Lluís' latest novel (Perpiñán, 1963), Junil a les terres dels bàrbars (Club Editor), has won the prestigious Joan Crexells prize awarded by the Ateneu Barcelonès for published work. The award joins the Òmnium award he received last January, and places Lluís on the select list of writers who have won it twice, along with Jesús Moncada, Baltasar Porcel, Joan Francesc Mira and Jaume Cabré, since in 2004 he had already won El dia de l'ós (a novel that will be republished in September by Club Editor, which will also recover Lluís' first work, Els ulls de sorra, next year, when it will be 30).
The announcement of the prize, endowed with 6,000 euros, has been made in the Ateneu itself during a meal that resumes, as the vice president Lluïsa Julià recalled, one of the rituals that had been put on hold for the last two years. The president of the entity, Isona Passola, wanted to insist on the importance of the award, because "it is like the Catalan Goncourt, and the oldest in Catalonia", since it was inaugurated in 1928 but hibernated from 1938 to 1982.
On the part of the jury, made up of Eva Piquer, Francesco Ardolino, Anna Ballbona, Andreu Gomila and Valèria Gaillard, Ardolino has valued the quality of the writing, the linguistic coherence and the fact that it is constructed as an Alexandrian story but later becomes both historical novel and palimpsest. For Gomila, “it is a beautiful and precise prose that does not go against the story that he narrates and that can also be popular”. So popular, details its publisher, Maria Bohigas, that it has already sold more than 13,000 copies.
Lluís has recalled that so far he has already made 116 presentations of the book –and he has more scheduled until October, when he will stop–, and has traveled more than 23,000 kilometers up and down.
Catalan version, here
