The poet and translator Aurora Luque (Almería, 1962) has won the National Poetry Prize this Thursday for her book A Finite Number of Summers (Milenio publisher), of which the jury highlighted its "high lyrical depth, exciting, demanding and transparent that places the unmistakable voice of the author as one of the great poets of our time”. The jury described the work as “a book of joys: of beauty, of the word, of the sensual, of life in general; a song to the Mediterranean and to the love for the Greek tradition, which looks at the universe from the past to understand the present, using the resources of tradition and the forms of antiquity to interpret our days”, and it is “a classic mosaic that we recover in the present and that takes us back to the past”.
Luque is an author with a long career that began in 1981, before she was twenty years old, with Hyperionida (University of Granada). Since then, she has published more than 17 books of poetry, including Gavieras (Visor, Loewe 2019 award), Orinque (2017), Haikus de Narila. Port (2017), Los lemons engrossed. Mediterranean Poems (Málaga Foundation, Critical State Award 2016), La siesta de Epicuro (Viewer, Generation of 27 Award 2008), Transitory (Andalusia Critics Award 1998) and Carpe noctem (Viewer, King Juan Carlos Award 1994).
The winner has a doctorate in Classical Philology from the University of Granada, and later worked in Malaga as a Greek teacher, columnist, editor and cultural manager, and was the director of the Centro Generación del 27 between 2008 and 2011, in addition to directing several poetry collections. and, in 2005, founding the Narila publishing house. She is part of the research, translation, literature and society group at the University of Malaga, and has published poems in magazines such as Barcarola, Turia, Clarín, Ficciones and Zurgai.
He has also done translations of French, Latin and Greek poetry, ancient and modern, such as Greco-Roman. Surviving lyric of classical antiquity (2020), If not, the winter. Fragments of Sappho, by A. Carson (2019) That living from the sea. The sea in Greek poetry (2015), Sonnets and elegies, by Louise Labé (2011), Poems, by Renée Vivien (2007) Poems and testimonies, by Sappho (2004) The dice of Eros. Anthology of Greek Erotic Poetry (2000).
The prize is awarded by the Ministry of Culture and Sports and is endowed with 20,000 euros. The jury, chaired by the general director of Books and Reading Promotion, María José Gálvez Salvador, is also made up of Jesús González González (deputy deputy director of the General Subdirectorate for the Promotion of Books, Reading and Spanish Letters), María Paz Battaner Arias (Royal Spanish Academy), Gonzalo Navaza Blanco (Royal Galician Academy), Leire Bilbao Barruetabeña (Euskaltzaindia), Josep Piera (Institut d'Estudis Catalans), Artur Ahuir López (Valencian Academy of Language), Román Álvarez Rodríguez (Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities), Francisco Javier Lostalé Alonso (Collegiate Association of Writers of Spain), Juan José Lanz Rivera (Spanish Association of Literary Critics), Carmen Enríquez Medina (Federation of Associations of Journalists of Spain), Esther Borrego Gutiérrez ( Feminist Research Institute of the UCM), Àngels Gregori (for the Ministry of Culture) and Miren Agurtzane Meabe (awarded in the 2021 call) .
