Palma City Council incorporates Spanish into this year’s Ciutat de Palma Awards after the victory of the PP in the regional elections on May 28. Until now, the narrative and poetry awards only accepted works in Catalan, but this Thursday the new municipal team announced a change in the rules to also include Spanish in the Narrative and Poetry awards.
The deputy mayor of Culture of Palma, Javier Bonet, has announced the novelty in the bases of the awards for this year, which include the two new modalities with the prizes for narrative and possessed in Spanish that will bear the names of Camilo José Cela and Rubén Dario, respectively, a name that was already used in previous calls, when the awards were bilingual.
“The obligation of an administration in relation to Culture is to support talent and offer the maximum range of opportunities to writers, creators and intellectuals, regardless of the language in which they express themselves”, Bonet declared at the press conference in awards presentation. He added that the new government team is “proud” to open the call for awards in Spanish.
“Opening these two modalities means normalizing what is normal on the street,” said Bonet. He has defended that each person can choose “freely and without imposition the language with which he wants to express his thoughts, his feelings or his art”. PP and Vox have also incorporated Spanish into the Mallorca Literary Creation Awards granted by the Consell de Mallorca, an institution governed by both parties.
Last year’s Ciutat de Palma Awards ended with controversy after the Poetry prize was won by a work written in Spanish and later translated into Catalan. Suspicions about this anomaly began when the prize winner, the Madrid writer Jorge Fernández, collected the award and did not say a word in Catalan during his speech to thank the prize.
The incorporation of these two new categories to the Ciutat de Palma Awards has made it necessary to increase the economic endowments in this call, with an item of 24,000 euros for the prize for the novel in Spanish and another of 12,000 euros for the prize for poetry in Spanish. The total endowment of the prizes reaches 132,000 euros, 36,000 euros more than in the previous edition.
The 12 categories of the 2023 Ciutat de Palma Awards are the Llorenç Villalonga Novel Award in Catalan; the Camilo José Cela Novel Prize in Spanish; Joan Alcover for Poetry in Catalan; Rubén Darío for Poetry in Spanish; Antoni Gelabert of Visual Arts; Ciutat de Palma de Cómic, with a free theme; Bonet de Sant Pere de Música, in which original recordings of any genre are admitted; Margaluz de Artes Escénicas, which admits works produced or co-produced by producers and companies from the Balearic Islands and premiered or performed in Palma.
There is also the Maria Forteza Audiovisual Award, which includes short films or documentaries; Montserrat Research Houses, with themes linked to Palma; Miquel dels Sants Oliver from Journalism, which rewards articles, reports or photojournalism published between January 1, 2022 and September 30, 2023; and the Caty Juan de Corral Gastronomy Award.
