Fundació Ramon Llull

Today, in Ordino, Andorra, the Fundació Ramon Llull has awarded its three prizes to people or institutions that have worked for the international promotion of the Catalan language and culture. Prize-winners are the Englishman Peter Murray, the director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), the Frenchman Bernard Lesfargues, a Catalan translator, and the German Georg Kremnitz, a linguist and professor at the University of Vienna.

The writer Imma Monsó has won the 32nd Ramon Llull Catalan Book Prize with her novel La dona veloç [The Hasty Woman]. The prize has been awarded by Editorial Planeta and the Ramon Llull Foundation. Imma Monsó received the trophy from the President of the Government of Catalonia, Artur Mas, in a ceremony that took place today.

This afternoon the Board of Trustees of the Ramon Llull Foundation met at the organization's headquarters, the Museu de la Casa d'Areny-Plandolit, in Ordino (Andorra). Their main decision was to promote, as of 2012, a new set of four prizes to acknowledge the translation of works written in Catalan and to also acknowledge people or institutions who have excelled in the international dissemination of Catalan culture.

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.