And the winner of the Omnium award for Best Novel of the Year is… Severina, the protagonist of La mestra i la Bèstia (Anagram) by Imma Monsó. The president of Òmnium Cultural, Xavier Antich, announced the prize this Tuesday evening in an event at the Casa Rius in Barcelona, ??in which, before the winner was announced, the journalist Anna Guitart interviewed the three finalist authors – the others have been Maria Climent, for A casa teníem un hymne (The Other) and Elisabet Riera for Una váeda sar summer la nit sincera (Males Herbes)–. With the prize, Monsó will receive an endowment of 20,000 euros, to which 5,000 will be added for the promotion of the work. The jury, formed by Magí Camps, Neus Real, Marta Pessarrodona, Toni Puntí and Marta Segarra, has valued an “original and powerful protagonist who arrives in Catalan literature to stay there, in addition to “the recreation of the speech local”.
And how is Severina? Well, she is a young woman who at the age of 19, fatherless and motherless, arrives as a teacher in Dusa, a small mountain town in Ribagorça in 1962. She has never gone to school, it was her mother who took her to educate at home in a rather peculiar way, an upbringing in which you also have to count the father, an anti-Franco militant in the underground, a situation that gives rise to several misunderstandings with which Monsó gives vent to his sense of humor. In the village, Severina will find the Beast, one of its inhabitants, who, like the character in the story, has a wild and tender double face. Shy and ultra-reserved, she has a very particular look, which the novel shows over the years and which we find from the beginning, when she is seven years old, in the revelation of the notion of death – “one day , of all this, nothing will remain”-. Monsó (Lleida, 1959) was inspired by family experiences when tracing the story, on the one hand because it is the land of his father and his mother worked there as a teacher, but also because when she got to write he found his father’s war file, with a very summary war council and all, and in the novel layers of personal experiences were added and distilled.
Born in 2017, the Òmnium prize is inspired by similar prestigious awards such as the French Goncourt and the British Booker. In the first edition, it was won by Raül Garrigasait’s The Strangers (Editions of 1984), and later it was won by Learning to talk to the plants, by Marta Orriols (Periscopi); The spirit of time, by Martí Domínguez (Proa); Boulder by Eva Baltasar (Club Editor), which last May was a finalist for the international Booker; Junil in the lands of the barbarians, by Joan-Lluís Lluís (Club Editor), and last year Ràbia by Sebastià Alzamora (Proa).
