Los fantasmas – and the publishing house Anagrama – win the Finestres prizes for narrative in Spanish and Catalan for published work, with Andrés Barba (El último día de la vida anterior) and Irene Solà (I gave you eyes and you looked at the darkness), while that the prize for a comic project in Catalan has gone to Nadia Hafid for her project Mala olor, a social metaphor based on the adventures of a worker in a company, as well as a mention in comics to young talent for Emma Casadevall, in his case with Lignite. a non-fiction story about mining operations in Catalonia. The prizes have an endowment of 25,000 euros – 15,000 in the case of the mention – and the comic projects will be published during 2025.
The Catalan narrative jury, made up of Marina Espasa, Anna Guitart, Mara Faye Lethem, Pere Antoni Pons and Gemma Medina, highlighted that Solà’s novel, “dazzling and powerful”, “shows off a singular ability to intertwine stories and serve them in an incessant and stylistically controlled barrage, with a living language”, “a world full of contrasts, also with humor and crossed by feminine solidarity, from an author who has a pantheistic view populated by forces of nature, witches and ghosts, bandits and hunters, ancient rituals and modern characters.” The author has assumed that hers is “a novel about ghosts who are on the other side and from their current place explain the history of the Guilleries and their farmhouse.” Furthermore, although they are ghosts, “which cannot be touched, the novel is very carnal, with constant allusions to bodies and their smells and pleasures.”
Solà also recalled that at the end of the day it is a story about memory, “about what we forget and what we remember, voluntarily or involuntarily”, and tinged with darkness, “but understood as a space of possibilities, also as refuge, of pleasure, of life, with a constant game with subjectivities, preconceptions and inherited ideas, since we can associate darkness with something bad, but it depends on whose eyes the darkness is looked at, and with human eyes sometimes It’s more about imagining what’s there.”
In the case of the narrative in Spanish, the jury, made up of Jordi Costa, Mathias Enard, Camila Enrich, Mariana Enríquez and Carlos Zanón, has valued “the exquisite and meticulous construction of the novel, a magic number with all the cards on the table, an invocation in full light that confronts and transforms two characters located on both sides of a threshold, in a dialogue (of gestures, details and repetitions) that the same structure of the novel reproduces with crystalline simplicity”, and has defined the work of Barba as “a rare avis, a chord that reverberates long after having been played.”
The author has insisted that there is a very clear way of seeing his story: “One person helps another”, something that is still the rule of ghost novels, since “someone trapped in a traumatic episode is helped by others.” ”. Her idea started from the image “of a woman who enters a house and sees herself doing the same thing as the day before”, but she couldn’t know how to solve it until she realized that in the pandemic “real life “It remained in a spectral place, it was a collective experience in which we lived without time.” Even so, he has also made it clear that his work “has nothing to do with the pandemic, beyond somehow sublimating the learning we have done, because we had all lived a ghost experience.” For Barba, “In recent years we have had a difficult relationship with fiction, with a lot of literature of the self and autofiction and the discredit of classic fiction, which has produced the desire to return to fiction, in many cases through literature of gender, which imposes its own rules.
Regarding the comic project in Catalan, the jury formed by Jordi Canyissà, Núria Tamarit, Adrià Turina, Lluïsa Pardo and Montserrat Terrones has highlighted that it is “a social story of furious relevance that directly questions us about the world in which we live and invites us to reflect”, “with an innovative and absolutely contemporary language”, because Hafid has “the double courage of dealing with uncomfortable topics and experimenting with the language of the medium he uses”. Hafid’s project is based on the bad smell of the shoes of the worker of a company with apparent neutrality, which reflects “the classism, racism and machismo” of many companies, but is still a “metaphor for society.” .
