El Fernando Lara Novel Award In its thirty-first edition, the prize already has a name: Marta Platel. The Barcelona-born journalist and writer has won with her work "The Maids' Dance" in a competition that once again positions Seville and the Royal Alcázar as one of the great literary showcases in the Spanish language.
With a financial endowment of 120.000 Euros For the winning work and with the editorial backing of Planeta, the award reinforces its status as a benchmark event for both established authors and emerging voices. This year, Platel's novel stood out among the 1.003 submissions, which included a strong presence of manuscripts from Spain, Europe, and the Americas.
A Barcelona-born winner and a novel marked by the post-war period
The author, born in Barcelona A graduate in Information Sciences from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, she has developed an extensive career in the field of specialized and general interest magazines. She has worked for publications such as "El Día de Catalunya," "TodoSport," "World Action Sports," "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit" (Spanish edition), the interior design magazine "Interiores," and is currently head of purchasing at "Lecturas."
Despite combining her professional life with journalism and editorial management, Platel has been consolidating a parallel literary careerHer first novel, "The Last Flight of the Queen Bee," set in Scotland, already hinted at a voice interested in emotions, emotional bonds, and the intimate vulnerabilities of her characters. "The Maids' Dance" is her second book, and recognition has now arrived with one of the most prestigious awards in the Spanish publishing world.
At the Seville gala, Marta Platel acknowledged that she entered the competition because she had complete faith in the story she had written and hoped that will reach a wide audienceThe author confessed to being "on cloud nine" after hearing her name and joked that the trophy might mean "excess baggage" on her return to Barcelona, a comment that reflects the friendly tone with which she experienced the announcement of the award.
The novel, which has been submitted to the prize under the title "Melisa" and the pseudonym of Patricia ArandaIt ultimately prevailed in the jury's final deliberation. In the final vote, the manuscript surpassed "Ongi Etorri" by four votes to one, with "Ongi Etorri" becoming the runner-up, thus confirming the strength of Platel's proposal.
"The Maids' Ball": intrigue, forbidden passions, and hidden identities
"The Maids' Ball" is a novel set in Barcelona in 1941A city still scarred by the wounds of the Civil War and subjected to the Francoist yoke. In this setting, the author constructs a plot where intrigue, romance, forbidden passions, betrayals, and hidden identities intertwine, with a pace described as thrilling.
The plot revolves around a group of maids who leave their villages in post-war Spain to work as domestic servants in homes of Francoist familiesFor many of these women, live-in domestic work is the only way out of hunger, poverty, and a lack of opportunities. One of the protagonists leaves a small town in the province of Burgos to settle in Barcelona, the starting point of a story that becomes increasingly complex as secrets, loyalties, and silences intertwine.
Platel has insisted on several occasions that the novel is intended to be a tribute to the women of the post-war eraThese are people whom poverty forced to leave their children and homes behind in order to survive. They are people with few rights, subjected to grueling workdays and harsh living conditions, who barely had any say in their own destiny.
Although the author avoids categorizing "The Maids' Ball" as a strictly historical novel, she does acknowledge that the work has a solid documentary background and with "historical undertones." The story combines fictional characters with figures inspired by real people from the period, taking precautions when modifying names and details to avoid offending family sensibilities.
From a thematic point of view, the novel not only explores power relations within the houses where the maids work, but also introduces elements of melodramaRomance and intrigue. The author seeks an atmospheric prose that combines a journalistic gaze with a deep emotional exploration, dwelling on nuances, intimate fractures, and contradictions of the characters.
Barcelona, the Nazis and the post-war period: a little-told context
One of the most striking aspects of the book is its recreation of the Nazi colony established in Barcelona in the 1940s and its relationship with the Franco regime. To research this, Marta Platel consulted newspaper archives and the works of historians, discovering episodes such as the celebration of Hitler's anniversaries in the city, in which Nazi officials and Francoist leaders met in pompous official events.
The author has pointed out that these types of celebrations and the Nazi presence in post-war Spain are episodes that are barely explained in textbooks, and that she was interested in them. recover that backdrop as an essential part of the novel's atmosphere. Thus, Barcelona in 1941 appears in the work as a defeated city, where the echoes of war still resonate while foreign forces move with relative freedom.
Along with the look at the daily lives of the maids, the novel also incorporates an international dimensionThe novel focuses on diplomats who, during Europe's darkest years, attempted to stand up to Nazi barbarity. Platel wanted to pay tribute to these figures, weaving the fictional plot with reflections on individual responsibility and the capacity for resistance, even in oppressive contexts.
This framework contains references to the Jewish presence The story also explores the flight of people persecuted by Nazism, allowing a moral and political commentary on the era to permeate the narrative alongside the intrigue and romance. The author even uses a quote from the Talmud—"Whoever saves one life saves the entire world"—as a central theme running through the story.
All this documentation work, compared with family memories and oral histories which the author herself has been compiling, contributes to building a novel that aims to be close to the readers, but without giving up the complexity of the historical moment it portrays.
The literary profile of Marta Platel
Beyond the anecdote of the award, Marta Platel's career is characterized by a writing style that combines journalistic precision with a strong emotional drive. Her texts tend to focus on the nuances of human relationships, on the silences that mark the characters, and on the tensions that arise between memory, identity, and the need to rebuild oneself.
Her narratives frequently feature characters who walk a precarious balance between fragility and resilience, between the everyday and the symbolic. This interest in atmosphere and subtext leads her to to suggest more than it explicitly states, relying on what is not said and on the gray areas where many of the important decisions of history are played out.
His connection to the artistic and performing arts world is also evident in his approach to writing: music, the body, and emotions act almost as a parallel language which accompanies the development of events. In "The Maids' Ball", this approach translates into intense scenes, in which the atmosphere weighs as much as the action and in which domestic spaces acquire an almost theatrical dimension.
Platel explained that he has been writing for years, despite having only two published novels, and acknowledges that the recognition of the Fernando Lara Prize adds a certain pressure when it comes to face their next projectHowever, he assures that he already has new ideas in the works and that his goal is to continue developing his own voice, capable of moving people without resorting to sensationalism.
With "The Maids' Dance," the author aims to establish herself within the current narrative landscape in Spain, with a proposal that mixes intrigue, romance, and melodrama, but which at the same time is grounded in a recognizable historical and social background for European readers and, in particular, for the Spanish public.
A well-established award on the literary calendar
El Fernando Lara Novel Award It is held within the framework of the collaboration agreement between Grupo Planeta and the AXA Foundation for the development and promotion of culture in Andalusia. Since its first edition in 1996, the competition has established itself as one of the major events in the Spanish-language publishing world, both for the number of manuscripts received and for the prestige of its awards.
In this 31st edition, the prize has reached the figure of 1.003 original and unpublished novels to the competition. Of the total, 509 come from different Spanish autonomous communities, while the rest are distributed between Central America, North America, South America, several European countries, and a small number of texts sent from Africa, in addition to some works without a specified origin.
At the national level, the figures confirm a participation is very distributed The entries are distributed geographically. Of particular note are the 111 works received from the Community of Madrid, the 83 from Andalusia (including 18 from Seville), the 65 from the Valencian Community, and the 64 from Catalonia. Manuscripts have also arrived from Castile and León, Galicia, Murcia, the Basque Country, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, and other regions, reinforcing the competition's national reach.
The award maintains a endowment of 120.000 euros The prize for the winning work is an amount that places it among the highest-paying awards in the field of Spanish-language narrative. Furthermore, the award-winning novel will be published by Editorial Planeta, with a release date already set for June 17th, guaranteeing significant distribution in bookstores in Spain and other European countries.
Throughout its history, the Fernando Lara Prize has recognized highly promising authors such as Manuel Loureiro, Roberto Santiago, Máximo Huerta, Alaitz Leceaga, Gonzalo Giner, and Ángela Becerra. Last year, the award went to Sergio Vila-Sanjuán for "Mystery in the Gothic Quarter," a crime novel also set in Barcelona, demonstrating a certain geographical consistency in recent editions.
Jury, finalists and a gala at the Royal Alcázar of Seville
The award organizers have highlighted, once again, the high level of the works presentedFrom among the 1.003 novels, the jury first selected a list of ten finalists, signed both with their own name and under a pseudonym, before deciding on the final winner.
Among these titles are works such as "De palo pa'rumba" by Jorge Torrente; "Secretos en llamas" by an author who writes as Mira; "La herencia del odio" by Sergio Moreno López; "Ongi Etorri" by Ángela Gancedo Igarza; "El peso de la belleza" presented under the pseudonym María Angiolina; "Mariasun y el fin del mundo" by Pedro Luis López Pérez; "La musa de Alejandría" by Jaime Restrepo; "Cuartas Inacabada" by Guillermina d'André; "Melisa" by Patricia Aranda (a pseudonym used by Marta Platel herself); and "Muerte en el Miño" by María Ángeles Valcarce García.
In the final phase, the pulse slowed to two main novels"Ongi Etorri" and "Melisa." As has been made public, the jury's vote resulted in four votes for "Melisa" to one for "Ongi Etorri," thus crowning Platel's work as the winner of the XXXI Fernando Lara Novel Prize.
The jury was made up of prominent figures in the literary and publishing fields: Ana María Ruiz-Tagle, representing the AXA Foundation; the writers and academics of the RAE Clara Sánchez and Nativel Preciado; the poet and essayist Pere Gimferrer, also a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and the editor Emili Rosales, who has acted as secretary with vote.
The awards ceremony was held, as is tradition, in the Royal Alcazares of SevilleSpecifically, the ceremony took place in the Patio de la Montería, a monumental space that has become the usual venue for the award announcement. The gala was hosted by journalist Jesús Vigorra and brought together representatives from the publishing, cultural, political, and economic spheres.
Among the personalities in attendance were the José Creuheras, president of Grupo Planeta and the Atresmedia corporation.; the CEO of AXA in Spain, Olga Sánchez; the president of the Cajasol Foundation, Antonio Pulido; the mayor of Seville, José Luis Sanz; and the Minister of Culture and Sport of the Andalusian Regional Government, Patricia del Pozo, in addition to other local and regional authorities.
Clara Sánchez was in charge of publicly announcing the winner's name on behalf of the jury, in an evening that reinforces the image of Fernando Lara as one of the cultural highlights of the Seville calendar and, by extension, of the Spanish literary scene.
This year's edition of the Fernando Lara Novel Prize leaves the impression of a Barcelona narrator With her second novel, she has masterfully connected an intimate story about post-war maids with a complex European context marked by the Nazi presence and Francoist repression. The success of "The Maids' Dance" in a competition with over a thousand manuscripts underscores both the creative energy thriving in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries and the award's capacity to give visibility to voices that explore, through fiction, still little-told episodes of recent European history.