Editorial earthquake: Isabel Allende wins the 2026 Planeta Prize with the sequel to 'The House of the Spirits'

Editorial earthquake on the 75th anniversary of the Planeta Prize. The writer Isabel Allende (Lima, 83 years old) has won the award on her 75th anniversary with the continuation of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Worth one million euros, the prize means that Planeta takes away from Random House one of its legendary brands, since the author was linked to the Plaza & Janés narrative label since 1982, when she published that first title of her career. Now, 44 years later, it will be on Planeta where you can read The Hour Before Dawn, the second part of that fiction that included the oral tradition of his own family and that would change his life. In this new installment, Alba Trueba returns to the family home after having been tortured by the dictatorship and there she will become a chronicler of a turbulent time. In principle, the prize only implies the publication of the winning work. The finalist of this edition, winner of 200,000 euros, is the manga specialist screenwriter Sergio Hernández (Valencia, 32 years old) with La Añoranza, a historical novel set in Barcelona in which a woman will discover that the French translator with whom she had an affair in the late 1950s was linked to a plan to assassinate Antonio Machado.

The ruling was announced this Thursday night during the gala dinner at the Fira de Barcelona venue in the presence of the Kings, a change of location - initially it was going to be held at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC) - for the aforementioned anniversary. In his speech, King Felipe VI recalled the award-winning novels by Mercedes Salisachs, Juan Marsé and Manuel Vazquez Montalbán and highlighted how the Planet has accompanied the country's transformation: "These novels have been a mirror of the path we have traveled. In their experiences we found something of ourselves."

In a room crowned with chandeliers and thousands of lit candles surrounding a projection of a library with the titles of all the winners and finalists, there were institutional representatives such as the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun; the president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa; the president of the Popular Party, Alberto Nuñez Feijoo; or the mayor of Barcelona, ​​Jaume Collboni. Among the 129 tables spread around the venue, 200 literary figures such as Eduardo Mendoza, Alana Portero - accompanied by her agent, Maria Cardona -, Boris Izaguirre, Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Santiago Posteguillo, Nativel Preciado, Máximo Huerta and Dolores Redondo. From the well-known faces of Atresmedia: Susanna Griso, Matías Prats; Alberto Chicote or Sonsoles Ónega.

Allende's bombshell in the ranks of Planeta comes months after another notable signing of the group via literary prize, that of the writer David Uclés, who left Siruela and moved to Destino after winning the Nadal Prize in January 2026. Allende jumps from publisher with a signature fiction, which combines historical memory, exiles and female genealogy.

The most read living Hispanic writer

Writer, philanthropist and feminist, winner of the Chilean National Literature Prize in 2010 and the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, Isabel Allende has sold more than 80 million copies, has been translated into 42 languages and is the standard bearer of a literature that weaves family genealogy, memory and magical realism from the female experience. She achieved success with her first novel, The House of the Spirits (1982), a family saga of four generations of women in which its members experience intrigues, loves and tragedies with supernatural elements in the midst of political upheaval in a country inspired by Chile. “The manuscript that nobody wanted to read,” that talismanic novel that she wrote at night while exiled in Venezuela and that she sent to the editor Carmen Balcells to be originally published in Plaza & Janés, was adapted to film in 1993 and Eva Longoria as producer has turned it into a recent six-episode television series. The universe of that novel is also comprised of two other titles, set in times prior to the original plot: Daughter of Fortune (1999) and Portrait in Sepia (2000). Titles that will now be completed with the latest Planeta Prize.

Daughter of a Chilean diplomat stationed in Peru, Salvador Allende's first cousin, the author returned to Chile with her mother and two brothers when her parents separated and there she would marry and have two children. Pinochet's coup d'état in 1973 led her to exile in Venezuela with her husband and later she settled in Sausalito (California), where she has lived for decades with her new partner. There, his daughter Paula, who inspired another of his bestsellers, Paula, would die of porphyria at the age of 29.

Sergio Hernández, finalist of this edition, is a writer who has combined his texts with graphic novels or audiovisuals. Writer and screenwriter, he is a Hispanic philologist from the University of Valencia and a screenwriter with a degree from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. In 2020, together with the cartoonist Toni Caballero, he published Backhome (Planeta Cómic). He also won the Diafebús Youth Novel Award for his work El Diari de Laia (Drassana), focused on generation Z. Between 2023 and 2024 he returned to the graphic novel with Hysteria (Planeta Cómic) together with Lolita Aldea and that year he published La letra wound, his first novel (Contraluz). "My father has been a bookseller, and I know what this award means, because I have grown up with it. When you start writing, you never imagine what it is like to be here," he explained. “Writing this book has made me rediscover the history of this country,” he said about his finalist novel, and highlighted the influence of other authors such as Almudena Grandes, Javier Cercas, Carmen Laforet and Carlos Ruiz Zafón on his writing.

Goodbye to the media

El Planeta awards the most read living writer in the Spanish language on a 75th anniversary whose splendor has drawn nostalgia when remembering the great names of literary prestige in her portfolio. In the parliament prior to the awards ceremony, the president of Grupo Planeta, José Creuheras, recalled the 47 million books sold with the award and highlighted that “we have been talking about authors for 75 years, but also discovering new readers.”

At the classic lunch offered the day before the award was given, a seven-minute video was shown where the big names and literary references for the general public appeared or stood out, such as Ana María Matute (the first woman awarded in 1954), Juan Marsé (1978), Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1979), Soledad Puértolas (1989) or Antonio Muñoz Molina (1991).

The 2000s transformed a Planeta Prize that has broken with the purely literary to look for names with media appeal. After the controversy over feminist opportunism generated by discovering that a trio of male writers (Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez and Antonio Mercero) were hiding behind the collective pseudonym of Carmen Mola, the presenter Sandra Barneda was a finalist in 2020, in 2023 she was promoted to Sonsoles Ónega and last year's edition highlighted a prime time debater, Juan del Val.

Asked about this supposed tendency to reward well-known figures through television magazines, the president of Grupo Planeta, José Creuheras, justified the drift by pointing to final sales. "I'm not the one to say if the Planet has more or less prestige than before. We have great names in contemporary literature among winners and finalists. The distribution figures of the prize are what support us and the number of people who come to the Planet is growing," he said at Wednesday's lunch.

The jury for this edition was made up of Luz Gabás, Pere Gimferrer, Eva Giner, Carmen Posadas and Belén López and two new additions have joined: the writer Paloma Sánchez-Garnica (finalist in 2021 and winner in 2024) and Javier Sierra (writer and winner of the 2017 award).