Jordi Coca, Esteve Miralles, Juan Gómez Bárcena and Josefina Caball have won the City of Barcelona 2022 awards in the categories of essays, literature in Catalan and Spanish, and translation. The awards have an endowment of 9,500 euros and will be delivered on February 15 at a ceremony in the Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Council, which has promoted them since 1949. Born as literary prizes, they have later incorporated other artistic disciplines as well as research scientific and educational projects.
The jury of the Ciutat de Barcelona Agustí Duran i Sanpere prize for essays, humanities and history has decided to award the play El teatre de Shakespeare en el seu context, by Jordi Coca, published by Edicions de 1984 and Edicions Institut del Teatre for its “contribution outstanding” to an “innovative and demystifying reading of one of the great authors of universal literature from the consideration of his work in the historical context in which it was created”.
The Ciutat de Barcelona prize for literature in the Spanish language went to the work Lo más es aire, by Juan Gómez Bárcena, published by the Seix Barral publishing house, for the “formal risk of the work, which manages to condense into the anonymous lives of a small town the experiences, the contradictions and the most universal yearnings”. “With a highly sophisticated work of language and time, in tension between tradition and rupture, the author signs a novel that, despite its experimental nature, is unartificial, very intellectually exciting and very intimate,” he remarks to the jury.
As for literature in Catalan, the jury awarded the Ciutat de Barcelona prize to the work El meu amic, by Esteve Miralles, published by Angle Editorial, for “having intertwined a personal story with the social and political portrait of Catalonia of the last decades through an agile narrative game and an exemplary style purification”.
Finally, the Ciutat de Barcelona prize for translation into Catalan went to Josefina Caball with the translation of El color porpra, by Alice Walker, published by Proa, for its “fresh and lively style and for the credibility and daring of the bet linguistics”.
The endowment of the prizes increased in 2021, when the Barcelona City Council recovered them after the pandemic, while maintaining the Barcelona Scholarships, because in 2020, for the first time in seventy years, the prizes were not given, but instead they were extraordinarily replaced with scholarships to support the creation.
Catalan version, here