Encouraging literary innovation and promoting young authorship are the objectives with which the new Diana Zaforteza Fiction Prize was born, which will have a prize of 20,000 euros and publication and distribution by Galaxia Gutenberg. The award is established in memory of the Barcelona publisher who was a pioneer of the boom in independent publishing at the beginning of the 21st century (first in Alpha-Decay and then in Alfabia) and who died in 2022 at the age of 43, after a long disease.
The driving committee, formed by Dolores Rodés, Lluís Coromina, Patrick Hoogvliet, Josep Massot, Mario Rotllant and Antonio Zaforteza, announced this week the basis of an award that seeks to award an original work written in the Spanish language, unpublished and not awarded previously Authors over 18 and under 43 can participate in the call.
The deadline will be open until April 1, 2024 at midnight and the ruling will be made public in June. The winning novel, which will be published on October 23, coinciding with Diana Zaforteza’s date of birth, will be selected by a jury made up of five professionals from the Spanish and Latin American cultural and literary world.
This year the jury is made up of Héctor Abad Faciolince, Isabel Coixet, Aixa de la Cruz, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón and Azahara Alonso, while Edurne Portela will serve as literary director of the award and Ricard Planas, as cultural manager and executive director of the award.
Born in 1978 in Barcelona, ??Diana Zaforteza maintained a “view free of academic dogmas” and her catalog of publications reflects “a spirit open to surprise and a commitment to authentically literary books”: along with the rescue of international classics such as Maeve Brennan, Saul Bellow or Gertrude Stein, she promoted contemporaries such as Wislawa Szymborska or Junot Díaz, and was attentive to creators from other fields such as Leonard Cohen or Paolo Sorrentino.
In Spanish he published renowned authors such as Juan Marsé, Enrique Vila-Matas or Cristina Fernández Cubas and young people such as Ricardo Menéndez Salmon, Marcos Giralt Torrente or Sònia Hernández.
