Isabel Allende wins €1m Spanish literary prize under pseudonym

Key Points:

• Isabel Allende, the Chilean-American author, has won Spain’s €1 million Premio Planeta literary prize with her novel La hora antes del alba, a sequel to her debut work, The House of the Spirits, written under the pseudonym Luz Ventura.
• The novel revisits characters from her 1982 multigenerational family saga, focusing on Alba, who recovers from imprisonment and torture during Pinochet’s dictatorship, and aims to conclude the story universe of The House of the Spirits.
• Allende, 84, expressed that winning the prize felt like winning the Nobel and noted that contemporary political extremism inspired her to write the sequel, reflecting on her own exile following the 1973 Chilean coup.
• The Premio Planeta, awarded to unpublished manuscripts with the option of pseudonymous submission, is one of the most lucrative but not necessarily the most prestigious Spanish-language literary awards, often favoring established authors and media personalities.
• The runner-up was Spanish writer Sergio Hernández, who received €200,000 for his historical novel La añoranza, while the prize's publisher Planeta secured a significant coup by publishing Allende’s new work, previously published by Penguin Random House.