Els fantasmes – and the publishing house Anagrama – win the Finestres awards for narrative in Spanish and Catalan for published works, with Andrés Barba (El último día de la vida anterior) and Irene Solà (I gave you eyes and you looked at the darkness), while the prize for a comic book project in Catalan went to Nadia Hafid for Mala olor, a social metaphor based on the vicissitudes of a worker in a company, in addition to a mention in comics to young talent for Emma Casadevall, in her case with Lignit, a non-fiction story about mining operations in Catalonia. The prizes, which are awarded by the Finestres Foundation, have an endowment of 25,000 euros – 15,000 in the case of the mention – and the comic projects will be published during 2025.
The Catalan narrative jury, made up of Marina Espasa, Anna Guitart, Mara Faye Lethem, Pere Antoni Pons and Gemma Medina, highlighted that Solà’s novel, “dazzling and powerful”, “shows off a unique ability to intertwine stories and serve them in an incessant and stylistically controlled flood, with a living language”, “a world full of contrasts, also with humor and crossed by female solidarity, of an author who has a pantheistic view populated of forces of nature, witches and ghosts, bandits and hunters, ancient rituals and modern characters”. The author has assumed that hers is “a novel of ghosts that are on the other side and from their current location tell the story of the Guilleries and their farm”. In addition, even if they are ghosts, “which cannot be touched, the novel is very carnal, with constant allusions to bodies and their smells and pleasures”.
Solà also recalled that after all it is a story about memory, “about what we forget and what we remember, voluntarily or involuntarily”, and tinged with darkness, “but understood as a space of possibilities, also as a refuge, of pleasure, of life, with a constant play with subjectivities, preconceptions and inherited ideas, since we can associate darkness with something bad, but it depends on which eyes the darkness is looked at, and with human eyes sometimes it’s more about imagining what’s there.”
In the case of the narrative in Spanish, the jury, made up of Jordi Costa, Mathias Enard, Camila Enrich, Mariana Enríquez and Carlos Zanón, valued “the exquisite and meticulous construction of the novel, a magic number with all the cards on the table, an invocation in full light that confronts and transforms two characters located on both sides of a threshold, in a dialogue (of gestures, details and repetitions) that the very structure of the novel reproduces with crystalline simplicity ”, and has defined Barba’s work as “a rara avis, a chord that reverberates long after it has been played”.
The author has insisted that there is a very clear way of seeing his story: “One person helps another”, which is still the rule of ghost novels, since “someone trapped in a traumatic episode is helped by others”. His idea started from the image “of a woman who enters a house and sees herself doing the same thing as the day before”, but she couldn’t figure out how to solve it until she realized that in the pandemic “real life remained in a spectral place, it was a collective experience in which we lived without time”. Even so, he has also made it clear that his work “has nothing to do with the pandemic, beyond sublimating in some way the learning we have done, because we had all lived an experience of ghosts”. For Barba, “in recent years we have had a difficult relationship with fiction, with a lot of literature of the self and autofiction and the discredit of classic fiction, which has produced the desire to return to fiction, in many cases through literature of gender, which imposes its own rules”.
With regard to the comic book project in Catalan, the jury made up of Jordi Canyissà, Núria Tamarit, Adrià Turina, Lluïsa Pardo and Montserrat Terrones has highlighted that it is “a social story of furious topicality that questions us directly about the world in which we live and invites us to reflect”, “with an innovative and absolutely contemporary language”, since Hafid has “the double courage to deal with uncomfortable topics and to experiment with the language of the medium he uses”. Hafid’s project starts from the bad smell of the shoes of the worker of a company with apparent neutrality and plurality, which reflects the “classism, racism and masculinity” of many companies, but it is still a “metaphor of the society”.
