Isabel Allende has won the 75th edition of the Premio Planeta, Spain's richest literary prize, with her novel La hora antes del alba. The book returns to the characters of The House of the Spirits, following Alba, the granddaughter of Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle, as she recovers from imprisonment and torture during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Allende said the novel would bring that fictional universe to a close.
Speaking at the award ceremony in Barcelona, attended by King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, Allende said: “I had never entered a competition because I wanted to avoid the embarrassment of coming last. At my age, there is very little to lose.”
Allende, who was forced into exile after the 1973 military coup that overthrew her cousin, President Salvador Allende, said she was prompted to write the sequel by decades of readers asking what happened to Alba. She also drew parallels between the novel's setting and contemporary politics: “Now that I see so many democracies threatened by authoritarianism, extreme nationalism and even fascism, I feel again the fear that led me to leave my country.”
Allende submitted the manuscript under the pseudonym Luz Ventura with the fictional title Los que faltan. The prize is open to unpublished manuscripts, with the option of anonymity. However, Prof Duncan Wheeler, chair of Spanish studies at the University of Leeds, said: “I’d be very surprised if the judges did not know that it was Isabel Allende. You have to bear in mind that the Planeta prize is one of the most generously remunerated in the Spanish-speaking world, but definitely not the most prestigious.”
The prize, run by the Planeta publishing house, has previously faced controversy. In 2021, the award went to La bestia, a thriller submitted under the pseudonym Carmen Mola, which had been marketed as a female author but was revealed at the ceremony to be three male writers.