Sebastià Alzamora is a Mallorcan poet, novelist, literary critic and cultural manager born in Llucmajor in 1972. Writing in Catalan, he emerged with the poetry collection Rafel in 1994 and has since moved between verse, fiction and essays. His novels include La pell i la princesa, Crim de sang, Reis del món, Ràbia and El Federal, while collections such as La part visible and La netedat have established a parallel poetic trajectory. Across these forms, Alzamora returns to historical memory, private grief and the moral pressures shaping contemporary life.
His 2025 collection Sala Augusta seguit de Llengua materna brings those concerns together through two linked sequences. The first revisits a former Francoist prison in Palma and the violence concealed within an apparently ordinary urban site; the second turns toward family memory and his mother. The book received the 2026 Serra d’Or Critics’ Prize for poetry and the Spanish Critics’ Prize in Catalan poetry. On 15 September 2026, Spain’s Ministry of Culture awarded it the National Poetry Prize, praising its movement between historical denunciation and domestic intimacy.
Alzamora’s work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, English, Portuguese, Polish and Danish. Alongside his writing, he has worked in publishing, cultural management and literary journalism. The 2026 awards recognise a body of work that links collective history with sharply observed emotional experience while sustaining Catalan as a language of ambitious contemporary literature.