Luz Gabás, author of ‘Palmeras en la nieve’, wins the 2022 Planeta Prize

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light gabas (Monzón, 1968) wins the Planeta 2022 Prize and its precious million euros. The Aragonese novelist is the winner of the 71st edition of the award with her novel Away from Louisiana as announced by the publisher after the traditional literary dinner held at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona.

Gabás, who has already dealt with the Spanish colonial past with palm trees in the snow (in this case in Equatorial Guinea) this time places its plot -“a great love story between an Indian and a French subject”-, in Louisiana at the end of the 18th century, when the then French colony passed into Spanish hands.

The winner of the Planet, who had presented herself under the pseudonym ‘Hoja de fresno’, had hidden the title of her novel under the fictitious Upstream. The award jury, which this year had nine instead of ten finalists after a novel was disqualified for having been previously published, was made up of José Manuel Blecua, Fernando Delgado, Juan Eslava Galán, Pere Gimferrer, Carmen Posadas, Rosa Regàs and Belen Lopez.

Gabás graduated in English Philology and obtained the position of full professor of university school. palm trees in the snow, his first novel, was written in 2007 and published in 2012. It was later adapted to the cinema with resounding success. the movie won two Goya awards. In 2014, the author published back to your skin and in 2017, Like fire on ice. Currently, Luz Gabás resides in Benasque, a municipality of which she was mayor between 2011 and 2015.

The second prize of the Planet goes to the novelist Christina Campos (Barcelona 1975), with Stories of married women. In 2021, the Planet rang the bell with Carmen Molaa pseudonym under which three authors who had managed to sneak into the best-selling book lists with their intrigue novels tinged with violence were hiding.