Nuria Amat wins the 31st Ramon Llull Award for Catalan Literature

Nuria Amat has won the most well remunerated prize in Catalan literature (€90,000) for her novel Amor i guerra (Love and War). The book is set in the Spanish Civil War and revolves around the relationship between the artist Valentina Mur and the bourgeois gentlemen Ramon Mercader, the man who on 20th August 1940 killed Leon Trotsky with a blow from an ice axe.
The story, which combines real and fictional characters, takes place in the Barcelona districts of Gràcia and Sarrià and the town of Figueres.

Amat published her first novel, El ladrón de libros (The Book Thief) in the early 1980s. Born in Barcelona in 1950, over the past twenty years she has combined writing novels and short stories with non-fiction, articles and poetry. Her work includes Narciso y armonía (Narcissus and Harmony), Todos somos Kafka (Everyone is Kafka) Viajar es muy difícil (Travelling is Very Difficult) and El país del alma (The Country of the Soul). The author has spent long periods in Colombia, Mexico, Paris, Berlin and various parts of the United States. "For many years I was known as 'the writer with no awards'", recalled Amat. Before receiving the Ramon Llull Award she won the 2002 City of Barcelona Award for her novel Reina de América (Queen of America).

Under the agreement between the Fundació Ramon Llull and the publishing group Editorial Planeta, each year the prize-giving ceremony is held in a different location, and is organized jointly by Editorial Planeta and the corresponding government. This 2011 celebration was held at Es Baluard, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Palma, and was coordinated by the Government of the Balearic Islands.

Nuria Amat wins the 31st Ramon Llull Award for Catalan Literature

The author has taken home €90,000 in prize money, the largest amount in Catalan literature