One summer day, invited by some friends to Tossa de Mar, the writer and journalist Jordi Solé was surprised by how present the legendary actress Ava Gardner is in this corner of the Costa Brava. The filming of Pandora and the Wandering Dutchman, in 1950, in this municipality and others in Girona marked a turning point for tourism. “I thought there was a story there,” says Solé. And that story has earned him the 56th Prudenci Bertrana novel award, endowed with 30,000 euros, which the Prudenci Bertrana Foundation handed out yesterday at the Girona Auditorium.
In The Year I Loved Ava Gardner (Columna), the protagonist is a young man who was 15 years old when he met the legendary actress, 13 years older, during that shoot. In 1990, after the artist’s death, the young man, now an adult, recalls those days when Tossa became a film set and when he loved Ava Gardner. “Facing a love story was a challenge for me, I left my comfort zone”, acknowledged Solé yesterday, who has been imbued with the filmography and bibliography of the actress. “Reading her memoirs seemed to me to be a funny character, with a sense of humor, tender and also a liar”, he explains. A novel where there is no shortage of characters linked to the Gardner universe, such as the bullfighter Mario Cabré, with whom it is said that he had an affair during that filming, or the singer Frank Sinatra, who in a fit of jealousy introduced himself to the Costa Brava.
The Miquel de Palol prize for poetry went to Jordi Solà with L’ombra de les hores, which has as its central theme the passage of time. “A time that is fleeting and fragile and is projected like a shadow”, he said.
The essay Carles Rahola was collected by Josep Muñoz Redon for The Garden of Epicurus, an exaltation of the concept of friendship and the joy of living close to nature. A book that the author places in the “hybrid genre”, as it mixes philosophy, theatre, journalism, travel and characters without being a novel.
The teenage children of Sonia Guillén, winner of the Ramon Muntaner for youth novel, were a “source of inspiration” for Cicatrius, a “hard and realistic” vision of this stage of life.
The Aurora Bertrana translation award was won by Josep Maria Pinto for the translation of Marcel Proust’s Time Reunited I and II. The best song lyrics in Catalan went to Artur Viñas for Things I Don’t Like About You, a love story that ends badly, and the commendable Curacontes project, of audio stories for children who spend long seasons in the hospital, won the Letra award.
