A sequel to The House of the Spirits

La hora antes del alba continues the story that began with The House of the Spirits, the 1982 family saga spanning generations in a country modelled on Chile. According to Reuters, its protagonist is Alba - the granddaughter of Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle - who is coming to terms with torture and imprisonment she suffered under the Pinochet dictatorship.

Allende has said the novel closes the universe of The House of the Spirits. Years of readers asking what became of Alba were what prompted her to write it.

The ceremony and the pseudonym

King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia were among those present when the award was handed out in Barcelona, where Allende described the moment as "like winning the Nobel".

The competition is open to unpublished manuscripts, and entrants may submit under assumed names. Allende did exactly that, giving the name Luz Ventura and the fictional title Los que faltan.

• Winner: Isabel Allende, writing as Luz Ventura, with La hora antes del alba - €1m (£843,000)
• Runner-up: Sergio Hernández with La añoranza - €200,000

Prestige and past pseudonyms

The masked entry brought back memories of 2021, when La bestia carried off the prize as the work of Carmen Mola - a pen name that turned out, at the ceremony itself, to hide three men: Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez and Antonio Mercero.

Prof Duncan Wheeler, who chairs Spanish studies at Leeds University and is president-elect of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, said: "I'd be very surprised if the judges did not know that it was Isabel Allende." In his view the prize, though among the best paid in the Spanish-speaking world, is definitely not the most prestigious; those honoured in the past range from Juan Marsé and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán to the TV personality Juan de Val.

José Creuheras, president of the Planeta Group, told El País: "I'm not in a position to say whether the Planeta Prize has more or less prestige than it did in the past." By the figures, he argued, the prize's reach speaks for itself, and the number of people taking an interest in it keeps growing.

Publishing and Allende's record

Planeta, one of the biggest Spanish-language publishing groups, runs the award and requires the winning book to appear under its own imprint. Allende, for her part, has published with Plaza & Janés - a Penguin Random House imprint - since The House of the Spirits.

Taking the €200,000 runner's-up purse was Sergio Hernández, a Spanish writer and screenwriter, for his historical novel La añoranza.

Allende left her country after the 1973 military coup in which Augusto Pinochet toppled Salvador Allende - a cousin of her father and Latin America's first democratically elected Marxist leader. Under Pinochet an estimated 40,000 people were tortured and upwards of 3,000 killed. At the ceremony, drawing a line from the novel's setting to today's extremism, she said: "Now that I see so many democracies threatened by authoritarianism, extreme nationalism and even fascism, I feel again the fear that led me to leave my country."

Her books have sold more than 80m copies worldwide and been translated into more than 40 languages.