Unbeatable Blai Bonet award

On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the extraordinary writer from Santanyí, the City Council of Santanyí has promoted this year a new award that is undoubtedly very important from now on among its already consolidated literary recognitions: the Blai Bonet prize for contemporary thought, and the person who begins such a milestone this 2026 could not have been a better winner than Lucia Pietrelli, a powerful author who precisely adopted the Catalan language for literary creation –in the manner of other figures who abandoned their mother tongues to use languages of adoption such as Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett and Agota Kristof– after the impact that the reading of the novel El mar, by Blai Bonet caused her. Her first and pioneering essay is titled Vestigis. Laberint amb pare en flames and has seen the light, like the other distinguished works, at AdiA Edicions.Vestigis starts from grief to turn it into a form of knowledge by transforming the intimate experience of the father's death into an inquiry of mythological, telluric, and cosmic dimensions. From this writing engine, some of the theories that Carl Gustav Jung built from alchemical processes of luminous wounds are confirmed: he warned us that we must, from our shit, make gold. And all this without falling into morbidity, as can be said of other recent and not-so-recent works that have set trends. Symbolically, the book seems written in the manner of a journey or heroic voyage from the inside of a labyrinth, a deep structure and explicit allegory of a consciousness that struggles to assimilate death and integrate it into life through different paths or corridors of a fragmentary nature. For this reason, it is appropriate that Joseph Campbell's reflections are part of a very detailed and quite complete bibliography alongside other great names of thought and literature, from the Greco-Roman mythological tradition to findings that could engage as equals with those of Pascal Quignard and Amélie Nothomb. From this perspective, we are facing an authentic and splendid European essay.The result is surprisingly clean, beautiful, and accessible, made of an allusive writing that never loses the capacity to communicate emotion and provoke commotion. Vestigis. Laberint amb pare en flames, by Lucia Pietrelli at AdiA Edicions, is a brave, creative, poetic, and Blaibonetian essay that does not suffer from the quagmires of the genre and shines with a hybrid writing that lifts a concrete anecdote and sublimates it into shared universal wisdom, since the accurate and dazzling final reflections arise from the very vibrant nerves of life's extreme tensions, those that lead us to the abysses of disappearance and emptiness and re-mind us what makes us human.