La Jornada: Nobel Prize winner Han Kang, one of the most anticipated presences at the Saint Jordi festival

Madrid. Faithful to the annual tradition, Barcelona became a festival of letters and roses, of legends that shake a society proud of its land, its history, and, at the same time, of welcoming into its streets the authors who turn the word into literature, into thought, into poetry.

This year, the writer Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, immersed herself in the streets of the Catalan capital to read aloud, to listen with all her senses open to the radiance of a city absorbed and surrendered to literature and the legend of the dragon, the princess and the rose.

Since 2004, when the Portuguese Nobel Prize in Literature José Saramago starred in the book signing in Sant Jordi, no writer with the award from the Swedish Academy had attended this celebration. Now Han Kang did it, a writer who advocates “reading” to build a better world and a more humane and peaceful society. But since it is also a celebration of large publishers, who concentrate part of their sales and profits on this day, other large brands attended along with Kang, such as the British Ali Smith, the best seller Joel Dicker or Frances Amélie Nothomb.

But the South Korean has loyal readers and there are many of them. Hence, although signing began at noon in La Central in the Barcelona neighborhood of Raval, from seven in the morning there were already readers queuing on the street. The publisher had warned that it would only sign 100 copies, although at eight in the morning there were already more than 200 people waiting. And so he spent a long time, signing books, talking to his readers, learning about their lives and listening to impressions of their books.

At this Sant Jordi, the presence of one of the great Barcelona authors of recent decades, Eduardo Mendoza, Cervantes Prize winner and perhaps one of the narrators who has best portrayed the paths of the Catalan capital in recent decades, was also expected with interest, but who also has a limitless sense of humor and is capable of laughing at everything, including the celebration of Sant Jordi, about which he said, to the dismay of the staunch defenders of Catalan culture, almost all unredeemed nationalists, that “we must say Book Day, not Sant Jordi. I’m going to start campaigning: Sant Jordi out. He was an animal abuser and surely didn’t know how to read.”

As for the sale of books and roses, booksellers and publishers celebrate this day with joy. The data for the 2024 edition shows, in which nearly 2 million books were sold in Catalonia during the week of Sant Jordi, generating a total turnover of 25 million 400 thousand euros. While florists also have reasons to celebrate. In 2025, around 8 million roses were sold throughout Catalonia. With what Sant Jordi is much more than a literary celebration, it has become an economic engine that drives sectors in the region, and in which culture, commerce and citizen participation mix, whether with the book or with the rose under the arm. Or with both.