2023-10-15 23:25:35
The journalist and television presenter Sonsoles Ónega has won the 2023 Planeta Prize, endowed with a million euros prize. She has done it for The maid’s daughters, a historical novel with romantic overtones about three generations of women in Galicia. Ónega, who currently presents the afternoon magazine And now Sonsoles on Antena 3, she thus succeeds Luz Gabás, the writer who last year won the prize with the highest financial award (even above the Nobel Prize in Literature).
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For his part, Alfonso Goizueta has been a finalist, and therefore will win the 200,000 euros that accredit to the second prize, for The blood of the father, a historical novel about Alexander the Great. Both works have been chosen among the more than 1,129 novels presented, 461 more than last year (846). A record number. The jury, which this year included José Manuel Blecua, Fernando Delgado, Juan Eslava Galán, Pere Gimferrer, Carmen Posadas, Rosa Regás and Belén López, had to choose among them.
“I thought I had already done the most difficult live shows of my life, but this is the most difficult,” said Sonsoles Ónega at the beginning of his speech and remembering his father, fellow journalist Fernando Ónega. “It is a novel that begins in the Galicia of the sea, in 1900. The Galicia that built the most brilliant episodes in its history. The canning industry. A story of businessmen who built that empire, who were in all the wars and made Galicia a place worthy of this history,” he said of the historical framework but underlined the fundamental theme, “destiny.”
“A novel of love, of searching for the truth and of characters lacking affection. A novel of brave women who worked the sea for 100 years and without any recognition,” she added about “the most demanding challenge” she faced in this, her seventh novel. “There is no citizen better prepared to face abuse than the one who reads,” she concluded and dedicated it “to writers with children and to the children of writers.”
Goizueta, 23, was very excited and confessed that this work about Alexander the Great was written during the pandemic and that it took him three years. It tells the story of Magnus from a child to “the conquest of Persia.” “Beyond the adventure, what interested me is the story of this boy my age who left his home and faced the void,” he added about a novel that he described as “an initiatory journey.”
popular faces
It is not the first time that a popular television face has managed to win or be a finalist on the planet. In 2020, Sandra Barneda was a finalist thanks to An ocean to reach you, and now it has been Sonsoles Ónega, the queen of television afternoons on Antena 3, a television network that belongs to Atresmedia, a company that is also part of the Planeta group. She achieves it after establishing herself in the ratings this season and against her most difficult rival, Ana Rosa Quintana, whom Telecinco moved to that slot to replace Save me and that has been defeated by the now winner of the Planet.
It is not the first novel by Sonsoles Ónega, who in 2004 published the short novel Havana Street, Obispo corner. Would follow Where God was not, about 11-M. However, his greatest success was the novel after the masterr (2017), set in Spain during the Second Republic, for which he won the Fernando Lara Novel Prize in that edition. In 2021 she published what was, until now, her last novel, A thousand forbidden kisses, already with the Planeta publishing house where he has five novels.
Before becoming popular on television, Ónega, daughter of fellow journalist Fernando Ónega, developed her work as a journalist. First on CNN +, later on Cuatro, and from 2008 on Telecinco news, where for ten years she covered information from the Congress of Deputies. From 2018 to 2022, she presented Telecinco’s morning show It’s already noonwhile she combined it with her work as a presenter of programs such as the reality show The strong house. He also tried his luck in the afternoon slot on the same network with It’s already eight. Last year, his signing for the competition, Atresmedia, was announced to present the program he is currently in charge of.
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