Penguin Random House buys leading Spanish publisher

Penguin Random House, a world leader in the publishing sector, has purchased Spanish publisher Alfaguara and other brands from media conglomerate Prisa for 72 million euros ($100 million), the parties announced Wednesday.

The news of the possible sale of Alfaguara, which was founded 50 years ago and integrated into Prisacontrolled Santillana Ediciones Generales, had been circulating for months and finally the deal was made public Wednesday, one day before the announcement of the Alfaguara Novel Prize.

Besides Alfaguara, the sale affects the Taurus, Suma de Letras, Objecive, Altea and Fontanar publishing labels. Left apart from the deal will be the activities of Alfaguara Infantil y Juvenil, the firm’s children’s division, which will remain with Santillana.

The union of Santillana with PRH will bring together an impressive array of authors.

Among those names are Nobel prizewinners such as Alice Munro, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago, J.M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing, V.S. Naipaul and Gunter Grass; as well as Cervantes Award winners Juan Marse, Jorge Edwards, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Sergio Pitol.

A year ago, the Bertelsmann and Pearson companies formed Penguin Random House.

The announcement of the sale was made by Santillana CEO Miguel Angel Cayuela and PRH chief Markus Dohle.

“When we officially became Penguin Random House, I proudly announced that this new company of ours was the first truly global trade book publisher,” Dohle said. “This acquisition makes the promise of that statement even more meaningful as we further expand our international reach and deepen our relevance in several major and growing markets.”

“This was not an easy decision to make,” Santillana’s Cayuela said. “However, these are times that require us to devote all our efforts to the very operations that defined us from the very beginning of our company, and our core business, which is education.