Paloma Sánchez-Garnica Wins a Planeta with Female Double alongside Beatriz Serrano

A second attempt was successful. Paloma Sánchez-Garnica (Madrid, 1962) has entered the exclusive club of 'planetas', at whose door she had already knocked. Three years after being a finalist, she is the winner of the 73rd edition of the million-euro prize, the highest paid in the commercial field.

This Tuesday night she won the award she so desired thanks to her novel 'Victoria', which she presented under the pseudonym Anna Akhmatova and the provisional title 'Good Night and Good Luck'. The finalist was Beatriz Serrano (Madrid, 1989) who pockets 200,000 euros with 'Fire in the Throat', a tale of the digital age aimed at a young audience, presented under the pseudonym Eutropio and with the provisional title 'Miracle'.

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Both authors received their awards from the hands of King Felipe and Queen Letizia, who presided over a solemn and multitudinous ceremony at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, where, in addition to the award, the 75th anniversary of Grupo Planeta was celebrated, founded by José Manuel Lara Hernández in 1949 and now one of the main publishing and communication groups in the Hispanic world.

An author of historical genre with notes of 'thriller' and mystery, Sánchez-Garnica weaves complex plots in her extensive novels, mixing past and present. A successful signature in the house and a bestseller, she worked as a lawyer for many years but left the gown for literature. She was a finalist for the award in 2021, the year of Carmen Mola, also with the presence of the Kings in Barcelona, who seem to be her talismans. She was previously the winner of the Fernando Lara Prize, the second most important in the Planeta universe.

In a novel in two times, Sánchez-Garnica returns this time to novelize about defeated Berlin in World War II and about the United States. Victoria, the protagonist of her winning story, will be forced to go to North America to spy for the Russians. There she will live a tender love story in the turbulent times of racism and the Ku Klux Klan. Back in her city, she will become a famous radio announcer who will manage to reunite with her family and live the construction of the wall live.

Born on April 1, 1962, and mother of two children, Sánchez-Garnica became a writer at the age of 43. Graduated in Law and History, she made her debut with 'The Great Arcane' (2006). Then came 'The Breeze of the East' (2009), 'The Soul of the Stones' (2010), and 'The Three Wounds' (2012). But it would be 'The Sonata of Silence' (2014), of which TVE made an adaptation, that gave her more readers. With 'My Memory is Stronger than Your Forgetfulness' (2016) she received the Fernando Lara Prize. 'The Suspicion of Sofia' (2019) and 'Last Days in Berlin' (2021), her finalist novel for the Planeta Prize and a bestseller, followed.

Sánchez-Garnica believes that literature is "a way of alerting to prevent us from committing the worst horrors of the past, although in Western democracies we believe we are safe." "If we do not understand what happened 80 years ago, we will be under threat of it happening again, as Primo Levi said about the Holocaust," she points out.

Also an author of the house is Beatriz Serrano, who published 'The Discontent' under the Temas de Hoy label. Her finalist novel is an initiation story in which the protagonist, Blanca, possessing certain supernatural powers, traverses the 90s and the early years of the 21st century and moves in a world of chats and digital networks. Daughter of a woman condemned by the society of the time for feeling different, Blanca will become a teenager who rebels against the abandonment she suffered in her childhood, at only nine years old.

"I never imagined being here," Serrano declared at the end of the gala after learning that she had been the finalist of this prestigious literary award. Regarding her novel, she said she used a neighborhood in Valencia similar to the one she lived in during her adolescence as a model.

Graduated in Journalism from the Complutense University, Serrano has developed her career in the digital field, specializing in new narratives. She has written for media such as BuzzFeed, Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, SModa, or Vogue. Together with writer Guillermo Alonso, she co-directs the podcast 'Arsenic Caviar', awarded the Ondas Prize in the best conversational category. With 'The Discontent', a fiction about work discontent, she was nominated as revelation author of the Openbank Awards.

In a very special year for Planeta, the President of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Salvador Illa; the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun; the Ministers of Transport and Sustainable Mobility and Industry and Tourism, Óscar Puente and Jordi Hereu; the Minister of Culture of the Catalan executive, Sònia Hernández; the Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, and the Government Delegate in Catalonia, Carlos Prieto, joined the award ceremony.

The 'planetized' writer Luz Gabás and professor Eva Giner joined this year the jury completed by José Manuel Blecua, Juan Eslava Galán, Pere Gimferrer, Carmen Posadas, and Belén López, director of Editorial Planeta and secretary. Gabás and Giner replace the deceased Fernando Delgado, jury from 2014 to 2023, and Rosa Regàs, who was for the last 21 editions, since 2003.