Isabel Allende Won Spain's €1m Planeta Prize — Then Admitted She Had Entered as Someone Else

Isabel Allende Won Spain's €1m Planeta Prize — Then Admitted She Had Entered as Someone Else

A pseudonym, a sequel and a seven-figure cheque

Isabel Allende has won the 75th Premio Planeta, Spain's richest literary award, worth €1 million — roughly $1.16 million — for a novel that returns to the family at the centre of The House of the Spirits, the 1982 book that made her name. The twist is that the judges did not know whose manuscript they were reading. Allende, 84, submitted La hora antes del alba (The Hour Before Dawn) under the pen name Luz Ventura, with the decoy title Los que faltan (Those Who Are Missing). The mask came off on the night of 15 October in Barcelona.

A king, a queen and a record entry list

The ceremony was held in Pavilion 1 of the Fira de Barcelona and presided over by King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Planeta, the Spanish publishing group that funds and runs the prize, accepts only unpublished manuscripts and permits pseudonymous entries. This year's field was the largest in the award's history: 1,424 original works. The runner-up, Sergio Hernández Carrasco, took €200,000 for La añoranza, bringing the total payout to €1.2 million.

Going back to Alba, and to the years of terror

The new book follows Alba, granddaughter of Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle, as she returns to the family house pregnant after being imprisoned and tortured under Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. Allende said the novel closes the universe of The House of the Spirits for good. She also said the pseudonym was a nod to the "luminous women" of that novel. Duncan Wheeler, who heads Spanish studies at Leeds University, told reporters he would have been surprised if the jury had failed to recognise her prose.

The prize is also a publishing coup

Allende has been published by Plaza & Janés, an imprint of Penguin Random House, since her debut — more than four decades. The Planeta rules require the winning book to be published by Planeta, so the award doubles as a transfer of one of the Spanish-speaking world's best-selling authors, with some 80 million copies sold in 42 languages, to the group that hands out the trophy.

"The topic is in the air"

Allende left Chile after the 1973 coup that ousted her relative Salvador Allende. Accepting the award, she said the timing of the book was right because "the topic is in the air". "Now that I see so many democracies threatened by authoritarianism, extreme nationalism and even fascism, I feel again the fear that led me to leave my country," she said, warning that democracy can be undermined "until it collapses". Asked about competing for the first time in her life, she said she had always avoided contests for fear of the humiliation of finishing last.

In shops on 4 November

La hora antes del alba goes on sale on 4 November with a first print run of 210,000 copies, launched at the Royal Spanish Academy in Madrid; La añoranza arrives the same day with 90,000. At 84, Allende is the oldest winner in the prize's history.