Luz Gabás, author of 'Palmeras en la nieve', wins the Planeta Prize

The writer Luz Gabás, author of the

, has won the Planeta award this Saturday night, which was announced during a massive dinner in Barcelona, ​​with a novel entitled

.

Cristina Campos, screenwriter and novelist, was a finalist in this 71st edition with

.

Last year, the Planet reached an endowment of one million euros - more than the Nobel Prize - and rang the bell with Carmen Mola, a pseudonym under which three authors who had managed to entrench themselves in the best-selling book lists with their intrigue novels tinged with violence.

Far from Louisiana

is a historical story -three of the four novels that Gabás has published are historical- that takes place in the 18th century during the brief period in which this territory belonged to Spain.

It tells the love story between an Indian and a settler.

is also a love story, in this contemporary case and, as its title indicates, it is above all a story of women.

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The millionaire Planeta prize reveals the identity of the best-selling Carmen Mola

With a million euros on the table ―and 200,000 for the finalist―, the Planet has become a commercial and literary operation unparalleled in the Hispanic world and you have to play it safe.

You need to sell many copies - more than 500,000 - to recover the initial investment.

Gabás, born in Monzón (Huesca) 54 years ago, is an author of the house with an atypical literary biography ―she was mayor of the PP of Benasque, in the Aragonese Pyrenees, between 2011 and 2015―, and lives apart from the literary world between occasions , horses and dogs in a mountain village.

In 2012, she managed to exceed those figures with her first novel,

a literary success set in Equatorial Guinea in colonial times, made into a film in 2015 with Mario Casas and Adriana Ugarte.

Since then he had published three other books:

and

.

The first two are historical novels and the last, a portrait of the rural world, depopulated, tired and, nevertheless, resilient, in which he lives and to which the writer Sergio del Molino gave his name with his essay

.

"I wanted the rural theme to be seen normally," he declared in an interview with this newspaper when he presented the book.

“I would like to see in this novel what beings live in the countryside.

They are much more normal, closer to you, urbanite, than it may seem to us.

The finalist, Cristina Campos, is also driven by a bestseller,

, which had a film adaptation released last year, directed by Benito Zambrano and starring Elia Galera and Eva Martín.

Born in Barcelona 47 years ago, she is a

director – the person who takes care of choosing the actors in collaboration with the director – for series and movies.

Her novel tells the story of two sisters, with very different lives, who receive a mysterious inheritance, a bakery in Mallorca.

In recent editions, with a prize money on the rise, the prize had also become a powerful showcase for the struggle for authors who dominate sales between the two large publishing groups that control half of the Spanish publishing market, Planeta on the one hand and Penguin Random House on the other.

In the 2019 edition, for example, the Planet served to sign Javier Cercas with

―a writer who had been launched by a publishing house of the group, Tusquets, but who had gone on to compete with

and Manuel Villas.

Cristina Campos, in her Barcelona studio in 2016.JOAN SÁNCHEZ

But the bell came in 2021, in the 70th edition, first when José Creuheras, the president of the Planeta group, announced that the amount of the prize would go from 601,000 to one million in the traditional press conference the day before the delivery.

And, second, when it was announced that the winner was

, a novel by Carmen Mola, a pseudonym under which the writers Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez and Antonio Mercero hid.

Mola, whose identity had been closely guarded, had sold nearly half a million copies on Penguin Random House stamps.

In fact, since then its authors have published in Alfaguara

, a novel that they had contracted before their signing for Planeta and that has just hit the bookstores.

Last year's finalist was Paloma Sánchez-Garnica for

.

The amount of the Planet and the fight for the authors also reflects the recovery of the Spanish publishing market after the pandemic and its hope that the figures will continue to get fatter despite the perfect storm that is looming over the world economy since the war in Ukraine and problems of the sector, such as scarcity and lack of paper.

According to the annual report of the Federation of Publishers Guilds of Spain (FGEE), invoicing grew by 5.6% in 2021 compared to the previous year, reaching 2,576.70 million euros.

This year, the group has opted for two authors who have published all their work in Planeta, with sales successes practically guaranteed.

The Festival of the Planet, which is celebrated every year on October 15 in Barcelona, ​​also regained its shine before the catastrophe of Covid-19.

In 2020, still with quite a few restrictive measures, an edition marked by masks and safety distances was held.

In 2020, it was the 70th anniversary and was attended by the king and queen of Spain ―and the bombshell of Carmen Mola―, but the number of attendees was still below other editions, with 600. This year, the group has thrown the house through the window with a thousand guests, 200 authors and a large representation of politicians: the vice president Yolanda Díaz, the mayor of Barcelona, ​​Ada Colau, the ministers Miquel Iceta, Pilar Alegría, Joan Subirats and Alberto Garzón... In recent editions, the representation of the Generalitat had been minimal.

On this occasion,

Through the Planet you can follow the evolution of Spanish literature, since it was won for the first time 71 years ago by a now-forgotten writer named Juan José Mira for

s.

Or, rather, it has become a showcase for the trends that dominate the reader's tastes in Spanish, from the historical novel to the noir genre or melodrama.

Writers have passed through the Planet for whom it was not easy to publish in Spain ―such as the exiled Ramón J. Sender who won it in 1969, in the midst of the Franco regime―, Nobel laureates such as Camilo José Cela or Mario Vargas Llosa, in addition to almost all the great names of literature in Spanish from Juan Marsé to Eduardo Mendoza, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Maruja Torres, Clara Sánchez, Terenci Moix or Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

With an endowment of one million euros, it is not surprising that this year the jury received 846 manuscripts, 200 more than the previous year.

Nine of them reached the final phase, and not ten, because one of the finalist novels had been published on a self-publishing platform.