Álvaro Pombo won the 2024 Cervantes Prize, the Minister of Culture Ernest Urtasun announced this Tuesday at the institution’s headquarters. Considered the “Nobel” of Spanish literature, the prize is worth 125,000 euros. The Spanish novelist and former politician succeeds Luis Mateo Díez, who was honored last year. He joins a list that also includes names such as Rafael Cadenas, Cristina Peri Rossi, Francisco Brines, Ida Vitale and Eduardo Mendoza.
Born in Santander in 1939, Álvaro Pombo graduated in Philosophy and Letters from the Complutense University of Madrid and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Birkbeck College, London. His first collection of poetry was published in 1973, entitled Protocols and, four years later, he won his first prize, the Bardo, for Variants. His debut in storytelling took place in 1977, with Stories about lack of substancecomposed of a series of short stories led by homosexual characters.
In 1983 he won the Herralde Prize with the novel The Attic Hero. With this publication, he inaugurates Anagrama’s Hispanic Narratives collection. Later, with The iridescent platinum meter (1990), won the National Critics Award. In this volume he began to practice what he called the “Poetics of the Good.” Álvaro Pombo entered the Royal Spanish Academy in 2004 and won the Planeta Prize in 2006 thanks to his novel The fortune of Mathilde Turpin. The hero’s tremor (2012), a big world (2015), The clock house (2016) and Santander, 1936 (2023) are other of his most recent publications.
Beyond literature, the writer fueled his political activity through the defunct party Unión Progreso y Democraia (UPyD), in which he was head of the list for the Senate during the 2008 elections for the Community of Madrid.
