Literary revenge

“I’m happy, but also very sad because it was not Jordi Cuixart who called me to tell me I had won the Sant Jordi; I hope he calls me and the sooner the better.” Joan-Lluís Lluís, like other winners of the night of the 67th Santa Lucia literary awards, showed mixed feelings of a “politically exceptional” year at the press conference before the annual Òmnium Cultural awards.

The winner of the Sant Jordi prize, endowed with €60,000, is what author Lluís termed as “literary revenge.” Jo sóc aquell que va matar Franco is the story of a “shy young boy who is blind in one eye and who reads the Fabra dictionary in its entirely.” He grows up not at all prone to violence but yet ends up changing history on June 12, 1940.

The idea for the novel came from a trip to Canigó when the writer, from Perpignan, was 16, and found a plaque with the inscription: “distrust history, dream about it, remake it.” He decided to imagine a different history because, he says without hesitating, “I was really angry that Franco won the war.”

As for the 59th Carles Riba Poetry Prize, worth €3,000 the winner is well-known but a poet who has not published for 26 years: Josep Maria Fulquet. His collection, Ample vol de la nit, will be published in February and stems from the reinterpretation of Milton’s Paradise Lost, but in the sense of a “catalyst.” Fulquet says “I was inspired by reading a series of reflections on the nature of art, the pain caused by absence, how we use our time and about the transient nature of our happiness.”

The novice writer, philologist and teacher Clara Queraltó (El Pla del Penedès, 1981), was awarded the 20th Rodoreda Prize for short stories worth €6,000. Her stories speak of “broken characters clinging to the past, overwhelmed by life and this prevents them from succeeding,” she explained. Writer and screenwriter Ivan Ledesma won the 44th Juvenile Fiction with Negorith. The story is a dark fantasy not very common in our juvenile literature.