La Uña Rota Wins National Award for Best Publishing Efforts

The publisher La Uña Rota has been awarded the National Prize for Best Cultural Editorial Work for the year 2025, as announced by the Ministry of Culture this Tuesday. The jury highlighted the publisher for “its constant dedication, perseverance, originality, and commitment to high-quality publishing, with a catalog that testifies to its demanding spirit and is one of the most valuable examples of the independent publishing landscape.”

The label, founded in Segovia in October 1996, is known for its carefully crafted editions and its strong commitment to authors who do not fit into the dominant market trends. Its first books were grouped in the small format collection Useless Books, which combined genres such as narrative, poetry, theater, drawing, photography, and comics, mainly featuring poetry collections from authors like Ángela Segovia, María Salgado, Luz Pichel, Carlos Bueno, or Lupe Gómez. In 2003, it launched the collection Books of the Prompt, which includes essays and classical literature. In 2005, the collection Stolen Books was created, comprising texts written for theater, featuring works by some of the most notable authors in the contemporary Spanish scene, such as Juan Mayorga, Angélica Liddell, Rodrigo García, Pablo Remón, Lucía Carballal, or María Velasco.

The jury of the prize also noted that La Uña Rota “has managed to make visible, cohesion, continuity, and quality in the publishing of less commercial genres such as dramatic literature, poetry, and essays. This is achieved through a heterogeneous catalog of singular works born on the boundaries of the avant-garde and the underground that, thanks to a timely and contextualization effort, achieve insertion into the Spanish cultural discourse.”

The prize, valued at 30,000 euros, aims to distinguish the overall editorial work of a natural or legal person who has stood out for their outstanding and innovative contribution to Spanish cultural life. It was first awarded in 1994 to the publishers Tusquets and Anagrama. In recent years, it has been awarded to Acantilado, Norma, Árdora, Páginas de Espuma, Media Vaca, Austral, and Kariós.