Isabel Allende wins €1m Premio Planeta, Spain's literary prize, under a pseudonym

Chilean-American author Isabel Allende on Thursday won the Premio Planeta, a Spanish literary prize worth €1m (about £843,000) and one of the most lucrative in the world. The 84-year-old received the award, now in its 75th edition, in Barcelona for La hora antes del alba, a sequel to her 1982 debut novel, The House of the Spirits.

The new book

The novel returns to the characters of The House of the Spirits, a multigenerational family saga set amid political upheaval in a country inspired by Chile. According to Reuters, it follows Alba, granddaughter of Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle, as she tries to recover from imprisonment and torture under Pinochet's dictatorship. Allende said the book would close the universe of that earlier novel.

Entry under a pseudonym

The prize is open to unpublished manuscripts, which may be submitted under a pseudonym. Allende entered as Luz Ventura, with a fictional title, Los que faltan. At the ceremony, attended by King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, she said it was like winning the Nobel. She explained that she had never entered a competition before, to avoid the embarrassment of coming last, adding that at her age there is very little to lose.

Allende said readers had asked for decades what happened to Alba, which prompted the sequel. She also drew parallels between the novel's political setting and the present rise of extremism. She was forced into exile after the 1973 military coup led by Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende, a cousin of her father. Under Pinochet's regime, an estimated 40,000 people were tortured and more than 3,000 killed.

The prize's standing

Allende's books have sold more than 80m copies and been translated into more than 40 languages. Prof Duncan Wheeler of Leeds University said he would be very surprised if the judges did not know who the author was, and noted that Planeta is among the most generously paid prizes in the Spanish-speaking world but not the most prestigious.

The prize is run by the publishing group Planeta, and the winning book must be published by it. Allende has been published by Plaza & Janés, a Penguin Random House imprint, since her debut. The runner-up, Spanish writer and screenwriter Sergio Hernández, received €200,000 for his historical novel La añoranza.