Álvaro Pombo has been awarded the 2024 Cervantes Prize, for his “own literary world that moves and hurts.” “The Spanish language is fun, solemn, comical, fast, poetic and from many countries,” the Cantabrian writer defended this Wednesday, from the headquarters of the RAE – which he joined in 2004 –, where he shared his first impressions after be awarded what is considered the ‘Nobel’ of literature in Spanish.
“Cervantes didn’t have any prizes, the second part of Don Quixote was plagiarized, he was in prison, he was a brilliant idiot,” he described the famous author, “he only had talent, grace, that kind of good humor.” The honoree, who at 85 years old published his last book, The exclaustrado (Anagrama), last October, praised the role that philosophy has played both in his life and in his work.
Not in vain, he has a degree in Philosophy and Letters from the Complutense University of Madrid, and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Birkbeck College in London. “Whenever I have the opportunity I speak about the color of philosophical eloquence because it is very beautiful,” he declared. , “I am faithful to philosophy and theology.”
He also dedicated a few words to irony. “It is a literary device, Cervantine, you have to not believe it,” he maintained, “it is not a primary feeling like fury, love or hate would be. “It’s secondary.” “A feeling of an older person, because when you are young it is not that you believe it, it is that you can really believe it. “You have the strength, the sunlight,” he reflected, “when you reach the deepest old age, the irony lies in where you have arrived, where we have all arrived.”
The next thing he has in hand is a novel about the wars in Africa. “I have the impression that I have never taken fiction or history seriously,” he confessed, “in this book I feel that, in some way, the story is not well sewn.” Furthermore, he stated: “Each one of us is the result of a historical circumstance.”
“I am going to spend the 125,000 euros sparingly”
The Cervantes Prize is endowed with 125,000 euros, an amount about which he commented: “I will not say that I am going to save it, but I am going to spend it sparingly. “They have been very good to me.” “The money goes in the cards, in the fish, in the plaza. Not in vices. Not at the parties, well there maybe; but for modest people like me, money is gone,” he admitted, not without irony, bringing a smile to his face. “Money laughs at me because I have never had much,” he added before acknowledging that, in reality, he has “not had much either.”
The award-winning writer has complained that, when he was little, his mother told him that when he grew up he was going to be a “rut.” “It’s not true. It’s not that it is, it’s that it doesn’t reach us a month. My parents and grandparents don’t understand the modern world. The money is not enough and I hope that these 125,000 euros will help me because it is the last thing that I am going to grab a little solid,” he stated. At the same time, he has stressed that fortunes are a “very important and clearly Castilian topic, for noblemen and peasants.”
Álvaro Pombo has shared the first details about the gratitude speech he will give upon receiving the award, at the ceremony to be held on April 23, in the Auditorium of the University of Alcalá de Henares. In it he will allude to Mr. Vidriera, one of the Exemplary novels of Cervantes. “He said that there was no story in that book of stories that was not exemplary, from which some moral or spiritual lesson could not be drawn,” he described.
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