Isabel Allende wins Spanish literary award for follow-up to 'House of the Soul'

(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Song Jin-won = Famous Chilean novelist Isabel Allende (84) won Spain's Planeta Award for her follow-up to her debut novel, 'House of the Soul.' The prize money is 1 million euros (about 1.5 billion won), making it one of the largest literary prizes in the world.

According to the British daily Guardian on the 17th (local time), Allende won the 75th Planeta Award for his novel 'The Hour Before Dawn' (La hora antes del alba) in Barcelona, ​​Spain, on the 15th.

The Planeta Prize is Spain's representative literary award for unpublished full-length novel manuscripts. Applicants can use a pen name and a fictitious work title, and the winning work will be published through Planeta Publishing Group, which organizes the award.

Allende entered this contest under the pen name 'Luz Ventura' and also submitted the work with the working title 'Los que faltan' (The Vanishing Ones). Along with the announcement of the winning work, the actual author and official title were revealed.

According to Reuters, the winning work is a sequel to Allende's masterpiece 'House of the Soul', published in 1982. 'House of the Soul' is a novel that depicts love and conflict, power and violence, and political oppression across three generations of one family, set against the backdrop of Chile's fettered modern history. The sequel tells the story of Alba, the granddaughter of the main characters in the novel, rebuilding her life after experiencing imprisonment and torture under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Allende said at the awards ceremony, "It feels like I won the Nobel Prize."

He said, "I have never applied for a literary award contest before because I wanted to avoid the embarrassment of coming in last place," and said, "At my age, I have almost nothing to lose."

Allende said he was inspired to write the sequel after decades of readers asking about Alba's whereabouts. He also pointed out that there are similarities between the political situation in the work and the rise of extremism today.

Allende went into exile in 1973 when his relative, President Salvador Allende, was overthrown in a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet. It is estimated that about 40,000 people were tortured and more than 3,000 were murdered under the Pinochet dictatorship.

“Many democratic countries are now under threat from authoritarianism, extreme nationalism and even fascism,” Allende said. “The fear that made me leave my country is felt again.”

Allende is one of the best-known authors in the Spanish-speaking world. His books have sold more than 80 million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 40 languages. In particular, his debut and representative work, the full-length novel 'House of the Soul', was a hit in 1993 when it was made into a movie starring many famous Hollywood actors, including Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Winona Ryder, Glenn Close, and Antonio Banderas.

The Guardian pointed out that the Planeta Prize tends to favor writers with established reputations or people who are well-known through their appearances on TV.

This raised the possibility that the judges recognized Allende's writing style and guessed who the actual author was.

Professor Duncan Wheeler, head of the Spanish department at the University of Leeds, told the Guardian, "I don't think the judges knew that the work was Allende's."