The 53rd edition of the Anagram Essay Award has distinguished The end of the world party, Natalia Castro Picón, for his ability to read the present from a cultural and political perspective. The award, endowed with 10.000 Euros, recognizes a text that turns the apocalyptic into a way of thinking about social change without falling into defeatism.
The work, selected among 170 originals from 16 countries, will arrive in bookstores on October 29. With a careful and not strident tone, the essay maintains that the apocalypse is not a matter of tomorrow but of the time we inhabit, and claims the imagination as a political tool to try out other ways of life.
The verdict and the winning work
The jury highlighted the intellectual courage of the book and its ambition to build bridges between literature, cinema, music, performing arts and visual culture to decipher the climate of the times. The question that runs through it —what are we talking about when we talk about end of the world—functions as a common thread in a cultural landscape saturated with endings.
The author proposes two narrative drifts that compete for meaning: one closing bet, which imagines the collapse as a total shutdown, and another transformative, who reads the crisis as a lever for opening up to the new. In his approach, the apocalypse does not imply surrender but possibility of restart.
Among the examples that populate the book appear banners of mobilizations in Sol, episodes of the series Blackout, novels like Outdoor by Jesús Carrasco or the travel writing of Sergio del Molino. The essay weaves together popular and canonical references to show how the "tone of the end" has taken hold. in public speeches.
Castro Picón interweaves cultural analysis and personal experience to maintain that the collective imagination is in dispute, and that this symbolic conflict affects the political action of the here and nowIt's not a book of prophecies, but rather an essay on how we report what happens to us.
Jury, participants and crew
The verdict was issued by Jordi Gracia, Pau Luque, daniel rico, Zafra Remedies and the editors Silvia Sesé e Isabel ObiolsOf the 170 originals sent from 16 countries, six works reached the final round before the jury decided on The end of the world party.
The prize money amounts to 10.000 euros and the announcement was made in Barcelona, at a presentation of the Editorial AnagramThe award confirms the house's commitment to an essay that engages with the present without losing critical rigor.
As a close reference, the last edition distinguished Without a narrative. Atrophy of narrative capacity and crisis of subjectivity, Lola López Mondéjar, a sign of an editorial line attentive to the cultural changes of the last decade.
Essay Keys: From the Great Recession to the Pandemic
The book covers the period between the 2008 crisis and 2020 pandemic, taking into account other turbulences that are interspersed: democratic erosion, climate emergency, dispute over the right to the city, outbreaks of racism and offensives against the Women´s rightsIn this context, the apocalyptic imagery permeates everything.
The essay analyzes how the stories of the disaster move from the media to the arts, from street slogans to audiovisual fictions, and how that symbolic landscape conditions the way of interpreting reality. Hence The end of the world party emphasize the political power of cultural forms.
Far from catastrophism, the author observes a tension between the paralysis of fear and the impulse to change that emerges at the limiting moments. The apocalypse, he suggests, can be a grammar for imagining other beginnings and not a full stop.
There are zombies, sea monsters, Tsunami, urban nomads and a whole iconography of the collapse that the book reads with critical ends, not as morbidity. In its pages also appear recent episodes that forced rewrites, such as a great blackout or the DANA in Valencia.
In current debates, the author has pointed out examples where a collective imagination renewed allows hope to be sustained, as occurred with the attention paid to a recent flotilla heading to Gaza, always from analytical prudence and without simplifications.
The author and the writing process
Natalia Castro Picón (Menorca, 1989) is a professor of Spanish culture modern and contemporary in the Princeton UniversityHe graduated in Hispanic Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid and she is a doctor by the City University of New York (CUNY). Before the essay, he published the poetry collections Flashing headlights y The same stone.
The project was born from a long and patient investigation —a decade of work interweaving reading, teaching and writing—and since his move to the United States, he has taken on a more reflective character. Autobiographical fragments, inserted with restraint, contribute closeness and authority to the analysis.
Publishing and book architecture
The edition will be available on October 29 and features a subtitle that places the research in the intercrisis period in Spain (2008–2023). The chapters cover episodes such as Eurovegas, the imaginaries of late capitalism, the cultural wars of the end of the world, the metaphors of virus and the tides that announce changes.
On several occasions, the author returned to previously completed texts to engage with a reality that accelerates with each event. This constant revision crystallizes in a volume that aspires to give language to disorientation and open a testing ground for critical imagination.
With this award, the prize reinforces a line that prefers to read the apocalypse as an essay of possible futures rather than as a final scene. The party of the title alludes to that energy that, even in the midst of collapse, invites think of other ways out collective.
