The memory of the prisoners of Can Mir and that of a mother who sewed shoes continue to bring recognition to Sebastià Alzamora. The writer from Llucmajor has won the Lletra d’Or for the best book published in Catalan in 2025 for Sala Augusta seguit de Llengua materna (Proa). The distinction, announced this Monday, comes just over a month after the National Poetry Prize, which the Ministry of Culture granted him on September 15 for the same volume. With this new award, the book has already accumulated five.

For an essay I am writing, for some months now I have been immersed in the ascetic film work of Robert Bresson, one of the masters of transcendental cinema according to the theorist and filmmaker Paul Schrader. Two of Bresson's best films, Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette, are based on texts by the French novelist and essayist Georges Bernanos, who now returns to Catalan bookstores with what is probably his masterpiece: A Diary of My Times. La Nova Editorial Moll is publishing the completely revised translation by Antoni-Lluc Ferrer, which had to wait forty years to be released in its original edition, and it does so with notes by the historian Josep Massot i Muntaner, who went as far as to declare that this very harsh book represents, with absolute fidelity, the abominable disasters that took place in Mallorca during the Civil War.

He is a benchmark for the Catalan language in the Balearic Islands. An expert in sociolinguistics and language models, before retiring Joan Melià Garí (Porreres, 1954) was a teacher at secondary schools and at the University of the Balearic Islands, where he held the positions of associate vice-rector for Linguistic Normalization and director of the Linguistic Service. He has also been the director general of Linguistic Policy for the Government of the Balearic Islands. In 2023, he published with the publisher Lleonard Muntaner Smiling with grammar, and now he brings to light, under the same imprint, Exemplary lives, his first foray into fiction literature, a collection of thirteen stories. He acknowledges the influence of authors such as Quim Monzó and, above all, Pere Calders, to whom he pays tribute in one of the stories. On Saturday, October 17th, at 7:30 PM, he will present the book at the Cultural Association of Porreres, accompanied by Cesca Roig and Maria Muntaner.

The Llibres Colom bookstore in Palma will close its doors at the end of October after 61 years of history. The establishment, located in the square known as Plaça dels Patins, has not found anyone to take over before the retirement of the person in charge, Marian Colom.

Maria Martorell thought the problem would be running out of writers. When she imagined Veus Pròpies, a publishing house dedicated to recovering in Catalan authors from the 19th and 20th centuries who had been left on the margins of the canon, she calculated that she might have material for three or four years. Now she knows she was wrong. “There is material for many years,” she says. The more she searches, the more names appear.

The Magaluf Expanded Literature Festival takes place on a contradiction that is difficult to avoid. For four days, books occupy one of the great epicenters of mass tourism and binge drinking in Mallorca. They do so hand in hand with the hotel chain Melià, a company that is an exponent of 'balearization,' the export of the intensive tourism model first implemented in the Archipelago and transferred all over the world.

When someone thinks about going to a literary festival, they don't imagine they could leave with a tattooed arm or shoulder. The unknown in the equation is isolated when you add FLEM to Magaluf: the Magaluf Expanded Literature Festival, a festival that long ago stopped considering literature as an isolated discipline and has exposed it to coexistence with electronics, urban art, tattoos, podcasts, games, and even karaoke.

The sixth edition of the Expanded Literature Festival in Magaluf (FLEM) kicked off this Thursday by breaking a record, with 6,000 tickets reserved in just one hour, the event organizers reported. The official inauguration also marked the first presentation of the FLEM-Magaluf Novel Prize, which debuts this year with the aim of promoting emerging writers in the Spanish language, under 35 years of age, and which in its first call has been awarded to Raúl E. Asencio for Do Not Descend.

Reading a book on a toy surfboard in a wave pool at a hotel on one of the most overexploited beaches in Mallorca. This is how the sixth edition of the Magaluf Expanded Literature Festival, the FLEM, is being promoted, which will take place from October 1st to 4th in one of the world's epicenters of excess tourism. The hook is clear: literature can also be fun, and the FLEM has come to provoke and break the schemes of classic festivals, against academicism and against solemnity.

"If we do not have Catalan, we are nothing, we have nothing". This is one of the most forceful statements that Carles Rebassa has made this Thursday in the inaugural proclamation of the 37th Catalan Book Week in Palma. The Mallorcan writer has turned the defense of the language into the central thread of his speech and has made an explicit call not to change language in everyday situations: "The democratic act of never changing language in our country".

A dozen book novelties by authors from the Balearic Islands, most of them also from publishing labels of the Islands, make up this selection of titles for the new season. We present them to you just as the editions of the two major annual gatherings dedicated to books in Catalan are about to take place: the Barcelona Week, between the 18th and 27th, which will have an island presence, and the Palma Week, from the 24th to the 27th, in the Misericòrdia gardens. These are some of the books that readers will be able to find at both events, and also in the bookstores of the Islands: dystopian, historical, and intrigue narrative; essays on characters and traditions; poetry with disturbing contents; theater of diverse signs, and a combination of images and science.

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.