Isabel Allende won Spain's €1 million (about $1.1 million) Premio Planeta, "one of the world's most lucrative literary prizes, under a pseudonym," for La hora antes del alba, a sequel to The House of the Spirits, the Guardian reported. The new book "returns to the characters of her 1982 novel, a multigenerational family saga set against political upheaval in a country inspired by Chile."
Speaking at the award ceremony in Barcelona, Allende said, "I had never entered a competition because I wanted to avoid the embarrassment of coming last. At my age, there is very little to lose." She added that she had been prompted to write the sequel by decades of readers asking what happened to Alba.
The prize is open to unpublished manuscripts, with the option of submitting under a pseudonym. Allende entered under the name Luz Ventura, with the fictional title Los que faltan. The award is run by Planeta, one of the largest publishing groups in the Spanish-speaking world, "and includes the condition that the winning book be published by them. Allende has been published by Plaza & Janés, an imprint of Penguin Random House, since The House of the Spirits, so this marks a significant coup for Planeta," the Guardian noted.
"I'd be very surprised if the judges did not know that it was Isabel Allende," said Duncan Wheeler, the chair of Spanish studies at Leeds University and president-elect of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland.
The runner-up was Spanish writer and screenwriter Sergio Hernández, whose historical novel La añoranza won €200,000 (about $224,390).