The 84-year-old Chilean author entered a competition for the first time and took the prize with La hora antes del alba, which returns to Alba Trueba. The win also moves her from Penguin Random House’s Plaza & Janés to Planeta after 44 years.
Isabel Allende has won the 75th Premio Planeta, Spain’s €1m (£843,000) award for an unpublished novel, with a manuscript she entered under the name Luz Ventura. She received it in Barcelona on Thursday night from King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. A record 1,424 manuscripts were submitted, and nine reached the final.
The winning book, La hora antes del alba (The Hour Before Dawn), had gone in under the working title Los que faltan. It goes back to the Trueba family of her 1982 debut, The House of the Spirits. Allende told reporters after the ceremony that the win was “like winning the Nobel”. She said she had never entered a contest before because she wanted to avoid the embarrassment of coming last. “At my age, there is very little to lose.” Chilean outlet Emol reported that her agent and her husband urged her to enter.
The pseudonym was chosen with care. Allende said Luz Ventura is a nod to the luminous women of The House of the Spirits, according to Chilean outlet The Clinic.
Alba, forty-four years on
The novel follows Alba, granddaughter of Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle, as she rebuilds her life after imprisonment and torture under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Spanish reports say she returns pregnant to the family home. Allende told the audience that readers have sent countless messages since 1982 asking what where Alba could be now.
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She also tied the timing to the present. Speaking at the ceremony, she said the subject is in the air. Seeing so many democracies threatened by authoritarianism and extreme nationalism, she said, had brought back “the fear that led me to leave my country”. Pinochet’s coup in 1973 overthrew President Salvador Allende, her father’s cousin, and she went into exile in Venezuela.
The House of the Spirits began as a letter to her dying grandfather, which she started writing in exile on 8 January 1981. She still begins each new book on that date, Emol reports. The novel follows the Trueba family through twentieth-century Chile. Her books have sold about 80m copies, in more than 40 languages. A Spanish-language Prime Video series based on the novel, with Allende as an executive producer, premiered on 29 April.
She worked as a journalist before exile, joining Paula magazine in 1967. Of Love and Shadows came next in 1984 and Eva Luna in 1987. Daughter of Fortune and Portrait in Sepia came around the turn of the century, and readers often group them with the debut as a loose trilogy. Her memoir Paula was written for her daughter, who lay in a coma and died in 1992. She used its profits to set up a foundation for women and girls in 1996.
The Wind Knows My Name came out in 2023, and My Name Is Emilia del Valle, which extends the same family saga into 1860s San Francisco, appeared in 2025. On 9 April she published La palabra mágica, a book about her writing life and craft. Earlier honours include Chile’s National Prize for Literature in 2010, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2014 and the National Book Foundation’s medal for distinguished contribution to American letters in 2018. The Planeta is the first competition she has entered.
A prize with famous winners and a publishing sting
Planeta’s founder, José Manuel Lara Hernández, set up the prize in 1952 with 40,000 pesetas. Its own material calls it the largest in the world for unpublished novels. Two Nobel laureates are on the winners’ list, Mario Vargas Llosa in 1993 and Camilo José Cela the year after. The prize also carries a condition — the winning novel must be published by Planeta.
Entering under a pseudonym did not necessarily hide her. Prof Duncan Wheeler, chair of Spanish studies at Leeds University, said he would be “very surprised” if the judges did not know it was Allende. The Planeta is among the best paid prizes in the Spanish-speaking world, he said, but definitely not the most prestigious. It has a record of favouring established names and TV figures. In 2021 it went to La bestia, published as the work of Carmen Mola, a name marketed as a woman author. Mola turned out to be three men, Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez and Antonio Mercero.
The runner-up was Spanish writer and screenwriter Sergio Hernández, whose historical novel La añoranza won €200,000. It is set in Barcelona in 1959. La hora antes del alba is expected in bookshops in November, according to Spanish outlet Artículo 14.