“Here we are Diderotians.” When Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, director of the Cultura / s supplement in this newspaper and winner of the Nadal award in 2013, says this, he is not referring to the philosophical precepts of the French encyclopedist, but to his sensitivity for the party. Apparently, Diderot and Rousseau often argued about the need for social life around culture. One thought that a certain festive emulsion was needed around the literary fact, the other believed that all of this was a hoax. “If people don’t meet, this thing collapses,” concludes Vila-Sanjuán, decidedly Diderotian.
The Nadal and Josep Pla festival has brought together book people since the 1940s on the night when the Christmas festivities officially end and also has the peculiarity of bringing together at the same Palace tables the spheres of those who publish and They write in Spanish and those who write in Catalan, something that should be normal and desirable in the city, but is not always. The night marks the beginning of another literary calendar, which is not measured by publication peaks, but by parties and meetings. It is a night designed to greet and hug each other.
In Barcelona the dress codes are always relative, and therefore at dinner, and at the subsequent drink in the very curious bar of the Palace, people dressed like a red carpet get together with others who have only brushed a comb, but for In general, a certain feeling of celebration floats in the air, necessary and advisable. “I remember seeing it on TV on Three Kings Day,” says writer Xita Rubert, who debuted last year as her assistant. They sat her at a table of literary agents and she learned the ins and outs of the award before it was made public – a classic – but she secretly wished she had sat “at the table with the cool girls.” She also declares herself a Diderotian because she, she says, tends to like the people associated with the book and she believes it is necessary to get together. Those who were left without their party ration during the pandemic years are still making up for it. The writer Maria Barbal won the Pla in the austere years, in which there was no sarao, and she wanted to live it. Inés Martín Rodrigo, who won the Nadal in 2022, had agreed with her friend, designer Moisés Nieto, to lend her a great model for the night, but it finally had to be cancelled. Now she is a member of the jury and she came, she was already playing, with a Nieto group. Regarding the Nadal-winning novel, that of Pérez Gellida, she assures that it is “very powerful” and that it is written with a clear desire for style. The first grand prize of the year goes to crime novels and who knows if it will set a direction for 2024.
