The award, promoted by Àfora Focus Edicions and Comanegra, went to a historical thriller set in the city of hustle and bustle.
This Monday, February 12, the festival of Santa Eulalia, the Goya Theater hosted the gala of the second edition of the Santa Eulàlia Novel Prize of Barcelona.
The award ceremony, promoted by Àfora Focus Edicions and the publishing house Comanegra, was attended by cultural personalities, political authorities and agents and prominent figures from the publishing world.
The ceremony began with the reading of several fragments of the winning work by the performers Jordi Bosch and Mireia Aixalà. Next, Enric H. March, Alba Cayón and Jordi González, members of the award jury, Fèlix Riera, Director of Áfora Focus Edicions, Joan Sala, President of Editorial Comanegra, Xavier Marcé, Councilor for Culture of the Barcelona City Council and Natàlia Garriga, Minister of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia.
Enric H. March, spokesman for the jury of the Santa Eulàlia Novel Prize of Barcelona, took the floor to highlight the importance of the event and the value of the initiative, thanking the collaboration and drive of all those involved, and detailing the values of the award-winning novel Next, he announced the name of the winning work of this second edition: Veus de mort als Encants Vells, by the Barcelona author Sylvia Lagarda-Mata.
The Minister of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Natàlia Garriga, was in charge of presenting the prize to the winner, the original work Niño in the window of the Éxito publishing house, Passeig de Gràcia (c. 1950), by the photographer Francesc Català. Rock.
To conclude the event, the winner of this second edition of the Barcelona Santa Eulalia Novel Prize, Sylvia Lagarda-Mata, made an emotional speech in which she explained the origins of her work and thanked the promoters of the award for the award. , Àfora Focus Edicions and the Comanegra publishing house.
Veus de mort als Encants Vells stands out for combining two great historical literary references in an original and credible way. On the one hand, it is a tribute to the father of the detective novel: Edgar Allan Poe (who also appears, although at a distance, in the protagonist’s longing) and his most emblematic character, Auguste Dupin. And, on the other hand, we are presented with the case of the “murderous bookseller from Barcelona”, who by chance of his passion for books falls on Detective Dupin’s table.
The jury has also valued the meticulous work of archival documentation and the ability to expand the usual map of novels set in walled Barcelona.
Sylvia Lagarda-Mata (Barcelona, 1961) is one of the main chroniclers and disseminators of the history of Barcelona. Specifically, dark and criminal Barcelona. With a degree in Information Sciences and a master’s degree in Audiovisual Communication, at the end of the seventies she was already writing about the myths and iconography of Barcelona, and since then she has not stopped doing so. She was head of advertising at the Generalitat of Catalonia. She has been a documentary scriptwriter, an advertising creative, and for many years she has been a professor of Communication, Film and Television. His books include non-fiction and informative essays, such as Fantasmas de Barcelona (2009), The Devil is Catalan (2014), Catalonia, land of pirates (2021) and Catalonia, land of bandits (2023), all of them in Editorial Angle. In 2008 she wrote a novel in Spanish, Mazapanes Bitters (RBA), which was a finalist for the Sent Soví Prize, and in 2020 she published The Shadow of Magui Still in the Garden (in Catalan in Columna; Spanish in Destino). Veus de mort als Encants Vells is her third novel.
Synopsis of the novel In Veus de mort als Encants Vells, Auguste Dupin arrives in the city to investigate a case that directly involves him, a case that has already unhinged the Catalan and French press and which probably constitutes the first “media” crimes. ” of our country: the case of the murderer of Barcelona booksellers.