Álvaro Pombo has won the 2024 Cervantes Prize. This was announced this Tuesday by the Minister of Culture Ernest Urtasun, at the institution’s headquarters. Considered the ‘Nobel’ of literature in Spanish, the award is worth 125,000 euros. The Spanish novelist and former politician succeeds Luis Mateo Díez, who was honored last year. He joins a list that also includes names such as Rafael Cadenas, Cristina Peri Rossi, Francisco Brines, Ida Vitale and Eduardo Mendoza.
Born in Santander in 1939, Álvaro Pombo 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. His first book of poetry was published in 1973, titled Protocols and, four years later, he won his first award, the Bardo, for Variations. His debut in narrative came in 1977, with Stories about lack of substancecomposed of a series of short stories led by homosexual characters.
In 1983 he won the Herralde Prize with the novel The Mansard Mansard Hero. With this publication he inaugurated Anagrama’s Hispanic Narratives collection. Later, with The iridescent platinum meter (1990), won the National Critics Award. In this volume he began to practice what he called the ‘Poetics of Good’. Álvaro Pombo entered the Royal Spanish Academy in 2004 and, in 2006, won the Planeta Prize thanks to his novel The fortune of Matilda Turpin. The hero’s tremor (2012), a big world (2015), The clock house (2016) and Santander, 1936 (2023) are other of his most recent publications.
Beyond literature, the writer fueled his political activity through the defunct Unión Progreso y Democraia (UPyD) party, in which he headed the list for the Senate in the 2008 elections for the Community of Madrid.
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