The novelist Juan Marsé obtains the 2008 Cervantes Prize, the most important distinction in Spanish literature, worth 125,000 euros. The author of Últimas afternoons con Teresa and Rabos de lagartija, among other works, prevails over writers who also sounded like favorites, such as the novelists Ana María Matute and Javier Marías, the playwright Francisco Nieva and the poet José María Caballero Bonald, in addition by the Uruguayan Mario Benedetti.
The new Cervantes declares at a press conference in Barcelona that the prize money will be spent "on wine and women."
Marsé reads his speech, in the Aula Magna of the University of Alcalá de Henares, with modesty and quite haste: “Believe me when I tell you that the other day, in Barcelona, before embarking on a trip, I was tempted to enter Don Antonio's house. Moreno, who has kept his head enchanted and talking since the times when Don Quixote and Sancho visited the city, and to bring me that head so that it could speak today in my place. Surely he would have said wiser and more useful words than mine."
His “intense vocation” and his portrait of a “convulsed society” weigh in the ruling.
In it, Marsé defends his identity as a Catalan who writes in Spanish, saying that thoughts and ideas "should deserve more attention and consideration than the language in which they are expressed."
Juan Marsé would become one of the references of Spanish literature, a literary memory of post-war childhood. He would die on the night of Saturday, July 18, 2020 at the Sant Pau Hospital in Barcelona, at the age of 87.
