Writer Isabel Allende wins €1m Premio Planeta — The Guardian

Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende has won Spain’s €1 million Premio Planeta literary prize for her novel La hora antes del alba. The 84-year-old author received the award in Barcelona during the 75th Premio Planeta ceremony, The Guardian reports.

A sequel to The House of the Spirits

La hora antes del alba returns readers to the characters of Allende’s debut novel, The House of the Spirits, published in 1982. According to Reuters, the new book follows Alba, the granddaughter of Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle, as she tries to recover after imprisonment and torture under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

The writer said the new work is intended to conclude the universe of The House of the Spirits. According to her, years of readers’ questions about Alba’s subsequent fate prompted her to write the sequel.

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The manuscript was submitted under a pseudonym

The Premio Planeta is awarded for unpublished manuscripts, and participants may submit them under a pseudonym. Allende entered the competition under the name Luz Ventura and submitted the manuscript under the fictional title Los que faltan.

At the ceremony, attended by Spain’s King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, Allende compared the victory to the Nobel Prize. She also said that she is once again feeling the fear that forced her to leave Chile after the 1973 military coup.

Allende’s books have sold more than 80 million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 40 languages. Spanish writer and screenwriter Sergio Hernández came second in the competition: his historical novel La añoranza received €200,000.