Barcelona is such an incredible and unique city that it has everything and nothing.” It is not a slogan, but a reflection of Lluís-Anton Baulenas (Barcelona, ??1958) after it was announced that he is the winner of the first call for the Santa Eulàlia prize for novels about Barcelona, ??called by the publishing house Comanegra and Àfora Edicions. The award was presented this Monday in a gala at the Romea theater in Barcelona.

The winning work, Seré el teu mirall, which will hit bookstores on March 1, takes place in 2003, the year before the Fòrum de les Cultures. That same year, in November, the writer saw an older man crying after the death of Snowflake, and this fact made him wonder about the relationship we have with the city, because the albino gorilla was not an animal of the zoo but “something else”, explained Baulenas, who sowed the spark of the novel “pulling the ball and going backwards”.

Thus, he develops a double redemption, in which two characters have to solve a problem, one of which has to do with the construction of the lifts that affect historical buildings. For Baulenas, this raised two questions: on the one hand, if we can spoil a city that we love, and on the other, if the bad things done to the city can be repaired.

His answer was “to create characters that live the novel and are reflected in the mirror of the city, which at the same time reflects them.” A work “with literary and popular ambition”, she explains. And to find out if she maintains her balance, she has a trick: “The novel works if my mother, who is 90 years old and of popular extraction, understands it”, and she points out excitedly that now she hardly sees it and “she won’t read it ”.

Among the evils that affect the city, Baulenas adds to the out-of-place constructions – which he does not deny, of course, that they had to do with Mayor Porcioles – a ghost real estate agency that launders money – which reminds that it is not something from that time , but that “it has been done all his life” -, and there are also several murders in a nod to the noir genre. Thus, she has detailed that the book “borders on the genre”, because it does not “drop the rings to make popular literature”. “It is a novel of characters that conveys ideas that I want to vindicate, but it is about the reader having a good time reading”, she develops.

The editor Jordi Puig has pointed out that “it was very difficult to have such a suitable novel and author”, since “few writers like Baulenas have explored Barcelona as much as a literary project, mapping the history of the city” in several episodes, be it the Civil War as the Olympic Barcelona. Fèlix Riera, president of Àfora, has highlighted that the book allows “to feel the psychological breath of Barcelona through the characters, in a very Barcelona atmosphere”.

Alba Cayón, a member of the jury with Francesco Ardolino, Llucia Ramis, Enric H. March and Jordi González, wanted to highlight the high participation in the contest, with 55 originals, given the short submission period –barely four months–, and how “ the characters are uncomfortable but tender and when you leave the novel you miss them”.

In addition to the publication, the award – to which Baulenas presented himself under a pseudonym – is endowed with 25,000 euros and a sculpture by Lara Fluxà, a work of crystal with liquid inside and which the president of Comanegra, Joan Sala, insists are “the Santa Eulàlia’s tears”.

Catalan version, here