The award-winning work invites the reader to reflect on the “ethical, political, and civil value” of words. “If I had to state what words are for, I would say that they’re to take care of each other.

As soon as words are used at the service of someone and they stop taking care of us, then they stop being the best words,” explains thinker and philosophy professor Daniel Gamper (Barcelona, 1969). This is how he presents The Best Words. Of Free Expression, a work that earned him the 47th annual Anagrama de Ensayo Award this Monday. Words, insists Gamper, serve to build a “we”. So, when the jury was choosing whose pocket the 8,000-euro prize money would go into, they chose words that seemed almost ready to be sung: “runaway and abject, talking nonsense and tipsy.” Words that can also be, in short, “hollow, hurtful, trolling, querulous and smelly,” explained professor and member of the jury Daniel Rico.

Read more here: ABC