Literary prizes, from the million euros of the Aena to the symbolic ten euros of the Goncourt

Putting the literary prizes on a Cartesian axis would have the following result: on the abscissas, on the bottom right, indicating high 'prestige' and low financial reward, would be the French Goncourt; on the top of the ordinates (vertical axis) would appear the newly created Aena prize for Latin American fiction with the million euro cheque guaranteed to its winner.

Collecting the first prize on Wednesday 8 April was the Buenos Aires-born, Berlin-based writer Samanta Schweblin (1978), who on the eve of the award ceremony, as one of the finalists, had said that if she won, she would use the considerable sum to finally get a steady wage. At the award ceremony at the Maritime Museum in Barcelona she appeared dazed: 'I am in shock, literally. I feel like I've just stepped off a roulette wheel,' admitted the 48-year-old author, awarded for her 2025 short story collection El buen mal (published in Italia by Einaudi under the title Il buon male).

A rich but controversial prize since its somewhat surprise appearance at the end of February: the sponsor is the airport company Aena, which manages 21 Iberian airports and is 51% state-controlled through the public company Enaire. A public patronage that has made many turn their noses up at it.

The ambition is to create the Hispanic equivalent of prestigious awards in other countries such as the Goncourt, France's most coveted literary prize and one of the oldest (dating back to 1896). In this case, however, the distance in terms of financial endowment could not be greater: the Prix Goncourt's reward is symbolic because it consists of a cheque for 10 euros which, moreover, according to tradition, it would be better not to cash. But what matters is the unparalleled commercial impact: the prize skyrockets the prices of those who manage to obtain it because it guarantees sales of hundreds of thousands of copies in French-speaking countries and paves the way for translations worldwide.

The UK's most prestigious award reserved for English-language writers from around the world is the Booker Prize. The reward in this case is 50 thousand pounds (just over 57 thousand euros) but above all a formidable boost to literary fame among readers in the Anglosphere, the countries in which English is spoken as the idiom of reference for historical or colonial reasons. A contribution that proved to be decisive for the success of Salman Rushdie, the British-American writer of Indian origin who won in 1981 with Midnight's Children, of the Canadian Margaret Atwood (two books awarded, in 2000 and 2019) or of Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things, 1997).