BCNegra returns with lifetime award for Jo Nesbo

The news con­fer­ence to an­nounce this year’s BC­Ne­gra pro­vided some clues about the focus of this year’s edi­tion of Barcelona’s an­nual lit­er­ary fes­ti­val ded­i­cated to noir and crime fic­tion. The venue for the event in the city’s his­toric Born neigh­bour­hood was half-hid­den amid dim al­ley­ways in a clan­des­tine at­mos­phere rem­i­nis­cent of the pro­hi­bi­tion era of the United States.

In­side, Barcelona’s coun­cil­lor of cul­ture, Xavier Marcé, was pre­sent along­side the writer Car­los Zanón, who in 2017 took over cu­ra­tion of the lit­er­ary fes­ti­val from the event’s founder, Paco Ca­ma­rasa, whose mem­ory Marcé paid trib­ute to be­fore going on to sum­marise this year’s 19th edi­tion.

The coun­cil­lor ex­plained that there will be some 50 ac­tiv­i­ties this year with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of 153 writ­ers tak­ing part in round ta­bles and dis­cus­sions, along­side film screen­ings, itin­er­aries, read­ing clubs, and even a lit­er­ary cabaret pay­ing trib­ute to French nov­el­ist Boris Vian, writ­ten and per­formed by Lluís-Anton Baule­nas.

The venues in the city host­ing most of these ac­tiv­i­ties will be the leg­endary La Paloma dance hall, the Jaume Fuster li­brary and the Mooby Bosque and Fil­moteca de Catalunya cin­e­mas, al­though there will be other events and par­al­lel ac­tiv­i­ties tak­ing place in var­i­ous com­mu­nity cen­tres, li­braries and cul­tural venues around the city.

The first thing Zanón did at the con­fer­ence was to an­nounce this year’s win­ner of the fes­ti­val’s Pepe Car­valho Life­time Achieve­ment Award, which will go to the pop­u­lar Nor­we­gian au­thor, Jo Nesbo, a for­mer econ­o­mist who has pub­lished 30 books, 13 of which fea­ture his un­ortho­dox de­tec­tive, Harry Hole. If that wasn’t enough, Nesbo is also a mu­si­cian who tours every sum­mer with his band, Di Derre.

“He richly de­serves this award both for the Harry Hole se­ries and for the stand alone nov­els. This award goes to the au­thor, but it is also a trib­ute to Nordic de­tec­tive lit­er­a­ture, which has pro­vided the genre with so much vi­tal­ity,” said Zanón. Nesbo will re­ceive the award at a cer­e­mony in the city hall on Feb­ru­ary 8 at 6 pm. The fol­low­ing day, the Nordic writer will be in con­ver­sa­tion with the jour­nal­ist Xavier Bundó, which will be fol­lowed by a screen­ing of the film The Snow­man (2017), di­rected by Tomas Al­fred­son and based on a book by Nesbo.

Ex­plain­ing why es­pi­onage and the world of spies was cho­sen as the focus for this year’s edi­tion, Zanón com­mented: “Through what we post on so­cial media and the mon­i­tor­ing of our on­line con­sump­tion, we have lost a level of pri­vacy that we would have fought for just a few decades ago. New tech­nol­ogy has made it pos­si­ble for all of us to be spied on and for all of us to eas­ily be­come spies.”

Many of the au­thors tak­ing part are in­ter­na­tional and in­clude such names as Alan Parks, Kike Fer­rari, Ali­cia Giménez Bartlett, An­dreu Martín, Ed­uardo Men­doza, Rosa Ribas, Toni Hill, Rosa Mon­tero, Bernard Minier, Marc Pas­tor, Car­les Porta, Chris Offut, Empar Fernández, Mari­bel Tor­res, Sil­vestre Vi­la­plana, Damià del Clot, Tuli Márquez, Xavier Aliaga, Aro Sáinz de la Maza, Anna Maria Vil­la­longa and Àlex Martín.

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