King Felipe and Queen Letizia will preside over the 75th edition of the Planeta Prize ceremony, La Voz de Galicia reports. The event takes place Thursday at a pavilion of the Montjuïc fairgrounds in Barcelona, moving from its usual venue at the nearby National Art Museum of Catalonia because the anniversary celebration needs room for a large gala dinner.
The winner will receive €1 million, keeping the Planeta as the richest literary award in the Spanish-speaking world, according to La Voz de Galicia. The publisher reported a record 1,424 manuscripts submitted this year.
Why it matters
The prize reaches its diamond anniversary at a moment when its organizers are pushing back against critics who question the literary quality of recent winners. La Voz de Galicia notes that speculation before the ceremony suggested the group might try to raise the caliber of this year's selection.
Group president José Creuheras rejected that framing, telling reporters the reading public decides whether the project succeeds. He pointed to sales figures as evidence that readers have endorsed the prize's direction.
Creuheras also recalled the award's founding mission. It was created in 1952 by José Manuel Lara Hernández to encourage reading in a Spain where books were not widely read and to help writers earn a living from their work. According to the president, both goals have been met many times over.
A record field and a wider language map
The 1,424 entries mark a new high for the competition. Creuheras said the prize's history now includes more than 47 million books sold, an average of 625,000 per edition, according to La Voz de Galicia.
He added that the publishing group has expanded its activity into a fifth language this year, French, joining Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese and English.
Jesús Badenes, the group's general director of the publishing division, described what he called the "Spanish miracle" — a phrase he said is now used at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which has just concluded, to describe the sector's steady growth since 2013. That year marked a delayed slump following the crisis triggered by the collapse of the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers. Since then, Badenes said, bookstore sales have risen 56 percent, with two-thirds of that gain coming in the last five years.
Badenes highlighted reading rates among young people and the weight of fiction, along with fast-growing areas such as manga and newer phenomena like murdoku. That puzzle format, which mixes elements of Cluedo and sudoku, has sold close to a million copies under the Temas de Hoy imprint, according to La Voz de Galicia. Its author, a contributor to the Financial Times puzzle pages, saw the potential in combining the two.
Badenes tied part of the sector's strength to the standing of bookshops in Spain. Physical stores account for 72 percent of printed book sales, with 40 percent of that total coming from independent shops — a share that has nearly vanished in England, where independents hold only 7 percent, according to the report. Digital book sales in Spain have stalled.
AI screening and the finalists
On artificial intelligence, the publisher maintains that the technology may be used as long as it is not tied to intellectual creation. Creuheras said all novels entered for the prize passed a filter designed to detect AI, and that the same screening applies to any work considered for publication by the group's imprints. Badenes noted that in the United States, abuse of the system had grown so widespread that Amazon limited authors to uploading ten titles a day to Kindle in a modest attempt to filter for quality.
Nine finalists are competing this year rather than the usual ten. The tenth was set aside because it appeared in print before the prize was decided, according to La Voz de Galicia.
The finalists span historical fiction, thriller and family drama. They are: La sombra de Isabel, a biographical historical novel about Isabella I of Castile by Pedro Regalado Rodríguez; Letraherido, a metafictional crime story built around an obsession with literature by Pepe M. Carrascosa; Alba Naranja, an emotional family saga by Tamsilt El Hayani, writing under a pseudonym; Los caminantes, an intimate historical novel by Martín Guerrero, a pseudonym; Kintsugi o tres almas rotas, a contemporary story about mental health and second chances by Hugalma de la Sierra, a pseudonym; La noche de los faroles, a choral historical novel by Mencía Salazar, a pseudonym; Los que faltan, historical fiction about a family struggling against hardship in a hostile place by Luz Ventura, a pseudonym; El jardín de Lennon, a generational coming-of-age story about friendship by Jorge Herrero, a pseudonym; and La mujer desnuda sale a las once, a novel about a guerrilla fighter and artist by Bernardo Galeana, a pseudonym.
The ceremony will confirm which of the nine takes the million-euro prize, with the royal presence marking the award's 75th year.
