Irene Pujadas and Edgardo Dobry are taking home the literary Ciutat de Barcelona

The jury of the Premis Ciutat de Barcelona 2021 has published the winners of the literary categories. There are awards for Catalan and Spanish Literature, Translation and Essay, Humanities and History.

The book Els desperfectes, by Irene Pujadas, is the winner of the Catalan Literature category. In the verdict, they highlight the writer’s vibrant style, as well as her daring and literary ambition. It also underlines the contribution to the Catalan storytelling tradition of the writer from Sant Just Desvern.

Edgardo Dobry, for his book of poems El parasimpático, is the new winner of the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona in Spanish Literature. His precise style and “humorous distance” and the “warm light on the ordinary to make it extraordinary” have captivated the members of the jury, who awarded the prize unanimously.

In the category of Essay, Humanities and History, also unanimously, the prize was awarded to the book Tosquelles. Curar les institucions, by Joana Masó. The reasons for this are “her invaluable research work on a subject as current and relevant as the understanding of psychological suffering in contexts of political, cultural and social crisis”, as the verdict mentions.

Miquel Cabal Guarro‘s translation to Catalan of Fyodor Dostoyevsky‘s famous novel Crim i càstig has earned him the first price in the Translation category of the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona. The richness of the language and the diversity of registers, the work of contextualising the world represented in the story, and the timeliness and opportunity of a universal work that still challenges us, were the reason for this unanimous decision.

In these categories, there have also been several special mentions by the different juries, such as the book Ruderals, by Caterina Pérez, “for the elegance and subtlety of her stories”, and La señora Potter no es exactamente Santa Claus, by Laura Fernández, “for her boundless imagination and unique style and voice in the current panorama of Spanish literature”. In the Essay category, the jury has awarded a special mention to Amelia Tiganus and her work La revuelta de las putas “for its forceful denunciation of an invisible reality”.

Check this link for more information.