Historic hotels often honor their illustrious guests of the past with tributes and commemorative events. Because the intimate history of universal literature overlaps with the biography of a few dozen renowned establishments where writers stayed, wrote, conspired, hid, loved, or unloved. Nothing gives more luster to a hotel than being able to link its brand to literary genius.
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The hotel sector of the Catalan capital also participates in this vindication of its legacy. The trail of Machado, Lorca, Hemingway, Stendhal, or Orwell can be followed in hotels that are still open or in others that have been transformed. But there are other establishments that have a shorter biography and strive to earn their place among that list of illustrious figures. In a way, they try to build from the present a past they can be proud of in the future.
One of them is the Alma hotel, host of La Vanguardia ‘s Sant Jordi celebration, which was attended yesterday by half a thousand guests from the world of books. The truth is that, in its thirteen years of existence, the hotel on Mallorca street has managed to become a true barometer of the city’s literary life.
La Vanguardia ‘s celebration yesterday welcomed its first Nobel laureate in Literature, the Korean Han Kang, who agreed to pose for the cover photo despite being a person wary of cameras. The good work of her publisher, Penguin Random House, and her complicity with our Culture editor-in-chief, Xavi Ayén, who has already interviewed her twice, facilitated the task.
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However, for the hotel, the author of The Vegetarian (incidentally, Han Kang does not spare the characters in this novel from being filmed even during sexual acts) is just one more writer on the already relevant list of Nobel laureates who have stayed at the establishment. This list also includes László Krasznahorkai, Olga Tokarczuk, J. M. Coetzee, Herta Müller, Svetlana Alexievich, and Orhan Pamuk. Seven Nobel laureates to add to the frequent appearances, thanks to La Vanguardia , of the strong candidate Enrique Vila-Matas and other very notable award winners such as the Cervantes laureate Eduardo Mendoza or the Goncourt laureates Pierre Lemaitre and Mathias Énard.
But hotels don’t live by literature alone. On another Sant Jordi, the amiable scientist Albert Fert, who was caught by the celebration while staying at the Alma, tried to explain to his lively interlocutors what on earth giant magnetoresistance is, for the discovery of which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. A discovery, by the way, that is not entirely unrelated to the publishing world: it is at the base of the hard drive revolution that has driven, among other artifacts, the digital book.
