The jury of Miguel de Cervantes Prize for Literature in the Spanish Languagecorresponding to 2024, chose the Cantabrian region Alvaro Pombo and García de los Ríos as winner of this year’s edition. The jury chose Pombo for the 2024 Cervantes Prize “for having been able to create his own moving literary universe”.
The Cervantes Prize jury highlighted Alvaro Pombo for “his extraordinary creative personality, his unique lyrics and his original storytelling. His very remarkable level as a poet and essayist combines with the fact that he is one of the great novelists of our language who studies the human condition from the emotional perspectives of deep and contradictory feelings”, we read in his judgement.
The prize, worth 125,000 euros, is the most prestigious prize awarded to Spanish literature.
Álvaro Pombo y García de los Ríos (Santander, Cantabria, June 23, 1939), Spanish writer and politician, graduated in philosophy from the University of Madrid and holds a Bachelor of Arts (Professor of Arts) from the University of Madrid. Birberk College, London. From 1966 to 1977, he worked in a bank in London and was interested in the English literary tradition.
Great poet, published Protocols (1973-2003), Variants“(1977), “H.aca a poetic constitution of the current year’ (1980), but he stands out as a novelist, being a highly awarded author. SO, where women He received the National Narrative Award in 1997; Squaring the circleFastenrath Prize 2001, and The ceiling, José Manuel Lara Foundation Prizeamong others.
He is considered one of the innovators of subjective realism and defines his literary method as “psychology-fiction”.
He has been a member of the Royal Spanish Academy since 2004, occupying chair j where he read his entrance speech entitled Verisimilitude and truth. His work has been translated into German, French, Dutch, Greek, English, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
Last year, Cervantes awarded the Spanish writer Luis Mateo Diez and the previous one to the Venezuelan Rafael Cadenas. Previously, the prize was awarded to the Uruguayan author Cristina Peri Rossi (2021), to two Spanish writers consecutively, Francisco Brines (2020) and Joan Margarit (2019), and to two Latin Americans, the Uruguayan Ida Vitale ( 2018) and the Nicaraguan. Sergio Ramírez (2017), breaking with the usual alternation of the prize.
The honors of recent years are completed by the names of Eduardo Mendoza (2016), Fernando del Paso (2015), Juan Goytisolo (2014), Elena Poniatowska (2013), José Manuel Caballero Bonald (2012) and Nicanor Parra (2011 ). among others.
In 1976, Jorge Guillén, one of the greatest figures of the 27 generation, received the first of these awards and, since then, there have been 42 other winners: 20 Spaniards and 22 other Americans of Hispanic origin. It wasn’t until 1979 that there were two winners, when tied to Gerardo Diego and Jorge Luis Borges.
