Concha Alós is the only person who has won the Planeta prize twice and, even so, both her figure and her works are still awaiting justice. Although the first time, with Los enanos (1962), the award was contested because Plaza & Janés claimed the rights—Alós had submitted the manuscript to the publisher and they initially rejected it for having overly socialist ideas—, two years later she won it officially with Las hogueras (1964).

Let's do an exercise. If we refer to Concha Alós, who recognizes this name? And to introduce her, which title sounds more familiar: that of former partner of the writer and journalist Baltasar Porcel or that of double winner of the Planeta prize in the midst of Francoism (a merit that she alone holds, by the way). The moment of change she had to live through, the sexist punishment, and her Alzheimer's contributed to the fact that today we still do not study Alós the same way as her contemporaries of the Mid-Century Generation –that of the 50s or the Children of the War–, such as Carmen Martín Gaite, Ana María Matute, and Carmen Laforet, and much less than them, Camilo José Cela, Juan Marsé, and the Goytisolo brothers. Alós was born in Valencia in 1922, lived in Palma in the 50s, and died in Barcelona in 2011, where she would have ended up buried in a mass grave if it hadn't been for the fact that she had a very good friend: Maria del Mar Bonet.

Literature in Catalan will once again take over the Misericòrdia gardens in Palma from September 24 to 27 with the 37th edition of the Catalan Book Week. The event will bring together around thirty participants and twenty activities, featuring names such as Dolors Miquel, Biel Mesquida, Empar Moliner, and Laura Gost.

The President of the Government, Marga Prohens, has expressed her congratulations to the writer Sebastià Alzamora, who has been awarded the National Poetry Prize.

Walter Benjamin taught us that works of art, when seen reproduced in a book or on a postcard, lose their ‘aura’. It is obvious that a reproduction can be very good, even absolutely faithful to the original colors and sizes –in the case of a painting–, or that the observer can get a very thorough idea of what, for example, the Mona Lisa is. But a reproduction of La Gioconda is not the original, because the original has the aforementioned 'aura', which comes to it from that theorized 'distance': the original has traversed time, and often also space, and appears before us in a place, without losing either its mystery or its authority. The concept of aura, then, is back in fashion now, it seems due to young people who meet to compete in fascinating and a bit grotesque 'aura battles', which first must be cultivated, or 'farmed', as they say, making an English verb their own, mainly learned from video games. Aura is cultivated because through battles or clashes between different young people, it is achieved that the social perception that others have of one's own charisma, style, presence, confidence, or the ability to show oneself as 'cool'. But young people are sharper than it seems; we must want to go beyond the blind and blunt criticism that many make on social media to end up understanding 'the game', because all of this is too revealing. Often one just needs to take a little care. Because the more aura you want to have, the less you have, or the more it seems you want to act cool and charismatic, the more your true colors show and you lose the game completely. I would not say that within the literary field things work in a very different way: there are those who have aura and those who do not, and no one seems more grotesque or dispensable than those who want above all to cultivate aura, that is, to start pulling strings or pushing buttons to appear to have greatness or insight or grace, when precisely if one had all that, one would not have to do anything, because we would already be there. The game or irony is competing for something for which one should not want the victory, because just by wanting it –or by exhibiting that desire– they can no longer give it to you. The winner must be the one who seems to want it the least, and at the same time the one who does things that, for one reason or another, end up fascinating the public the most. Now the aura is quantified, as Benjamin also taught us to do, who knew how to see which things were or were not 'authentic'. And this is where art returns, because all of it is pure simulation: one must make it look like one is doing nothing, no effort, or that the way of dressing, walking, dancing, or looking are not the result of hours of trial and error. If for Benjamin the aura was destroyed because of technology, these young people have learned that technology is the only way in which they can cultivate it. Art was unrepeatable, but the aura that is now sought to be had ends up being nothing more than a reputation for singularity produced through repetition. Art says nothing to them, surely, but what they do is nothing more than seek, in a more or less showy way, the artistic experience.

Joan Miquel Oliver begins his literary comeback with a new literary work that confirms, amplifies, and enlarges his unique worldview of the world and the bubble: La vida no són matemàtiques at La Magrana. It is, in effect, a book that is difficult to categorize and, precisely for that reason, decidedly stimulating. More than a conventional succession of stories, the volume is built upon occurrences, anecdotes, intuitions, obsessions, discoveries, whims, jokes, pranks, and small epiphanies that unfold with an unbribable freedom. To say they are occurrences is, by no means, an objection: it is a way of stating and recognizing the singularity of a literature that does not need to submit to narrative conventions to end up being original. Oliver writes like someone opening unexpected windows to reality and letting in everything that usually remains off-camera. And in this highly personal universe, there can appear, with the same naturalness, the Alaska kiosk, the missed teacher Toni Artigues, Alexandra Schneider, and Jaume Ripoll, from Filmin, both turned into key pieces of a personal universe in which the daily, the absurd, the drift, and the revelation coexist with the joy of a festival.There is in this work a grace and a wit that are deeply Majorcan, but which Joan Miquel Oliver takes towards a space of his own, a kind of viticulture surrealism in which reality seems to have been slightly displaced from its usual axis. In this sense, the creative operation connects with that of Alice Rohrwacher, capable of capturing certain Italian essences without ever turning them into postcards. Oliver reaches similar milestones with Majorca and his beloved haunts: he gleans the absurdity, the chaos, the tenderness, the decadence, the bad temper, and he does so with the strange capacity to alchemically transform moth-eaten traditionalism into delicious delirium that has not been fully exploited until now. He also talks about films, songs, paintings, books, and life misfortunes that make up what could be the first step of an episodic autobiography.Perhaps the most interesting thing about La vida no són matemàtiques is that Joan Miquel Oliver does not limit himself to repeating the formulas we already know from his career: he expands his creative torrent and ventures towards an even more unpredictable, pioneering, and libertarian literature. Whoever reads it may be bewildered, evidently, because he does not always offer the usual coordinates of narratology or diarism, but this bewilderment is precisely a virtue: it forces one to abandon expectations, to let oneself be carried away, and to accept that literature can also consist of looking at the world from unsuspected angles. And this, in a headlong literature like ours, is a rarity that should be celebrated.

Llucia Serra Ferre (Eivissa, 1992) has just won the Ciutat de Manacor poetry prize with Et dibuix un portal in media something (i tu t’hi ajoques). Living in Mallorca since her adolescence, she is a philologist, a high school teacher in Son Servera, and runs a board game publishing company in Catalan, Dino Ludens. So that the reader can get an idea of her writing, in Et dibuix un portal..., she quotes and paraphrases a poem by Antonina Canyelles that says: “You can say my boat, but the sails are always the wind’s”. Llucia Serra’s version is as follows: “You can say my house / but the lands / are always the bank’s”. The poem is titled ‘Idealista’.

Toni Planissi (Manacor, 1973) is a discreet man and an extraordinary author. A modesty that quickly dissolves when one begins to leaf through the pages of his new graphic novel Todas las mentiras conducen a la verdad, the story of two worlds confronting each other to defend a reality that each one believes to be their own and unshakeable. An ironic critique of politics, religion, and the foundations of agreed-upon truths, but often sustained by lies.

The Majorcan poet Marcos Augusto debuts as a novelist with Te hice dios (Random House), a work that explores desire, illness, guilt, and moral limits through a story that is as uncomfortable as it is ambitious. Two men meet in a chat looking for sex, but the encounter goes further: one wants to infect himself with HIV —he is one of the so-called bug chasers— and the other promises him that he will. It is the starting point of a relationship marked by destructive impulses, lies, and the need to love and give meaning to loss. We talk to the author about literature, love, and the limits of fiction.

There are cuisines that not only nourish, but also explain who we are: those that are passed down in silence, from generation to generation, and that live in memory before recipe books. From this invisible thread starts A kitchen in every home, the book by Pau Gómez Calvo, which combines memories, recipes, and reflection to reclaim a domestic legacy that, according to the author, is undergoing a complete transformation.