The names that sound the most to win the Cervantes award

The Cervantes Prize is the most important of Spanish letters.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
10 November 2022 Thursday 03:47
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The names that sound the most to win the Cervantes award

The Cervantes Prize is the most important of Spanish letters. Endowed with 125,000 euros and considered the Nobel Prize for Literature in Spanish, last year it went to the Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi (Montevideo, 1941), author of novels such as The Ship of Fools or Solitaire of Love.

To know the winner of this edition, number 48, it will be necessary to wait until 4:30 p.m. this Thursday, November 10. It will be then when the Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, will make public the name that will receive the award. One of the doubts is whether he will recognize poetry for the fourth consecutive year, after awarding Francisco Brines (2020) and Joan Margarit (2019), both deceased, and Ida Vitale.

It goes without saying that the expectation on both sides of the ocean is maximum. There are several names that are being considered. The vast majority are authors who resonate every year, such as Enrique Vila-Matas, Luis Goytisolo, Antonio Muñoz Molina Félix de Azúa or Luis Landero, who has just received the National Prize for Literature. Several authors also resonate in Latin America, such as the Mexican Ángeles Mastretta, the Colombian Fernando Vallejo, the Chilean Raúl Zurita or the Venezuelan Rafael Cadenas.

Created in 1975 by the Ministry of Culture, this award recognizes the career of a writer who, with his work as a whole, has contributed to enriching the Hispanic literary legacy and is considered the most important of those awarded in Spanish-speaking countries.

In the more than 40 years of existence of the award, only six times has it gone to a woman: the Spanish María Zambrano (1988) and Ana María Matute (2010), the Cuban Dulce María Loynaz (1992), the Mexican Elena Poniatowska (2013), Ida Vitale (2019) and the aforementioned Cristina Peri Rossi (2021).