“Unreality is the authentic condition of art.” This was stated by the writer and academic Luis Mateo Díez (Villablino, León, 1942) when he received today from the hands of King Felipe VI the Cervantes Prize, the highest award for literature in Spanish. The solemn ceremony that was held in the Auditorium of the University of Alcalá de Henares was filled with nods to Cervantes and the characters in the writer's extensive work to whom he owes everything and who aspires “to nothing.”
“I live dedicated to them, since they are the ones who save me.” “Nothing interests me less than myself,” he reiterated, parsimoniously about characters who do not have as much Cervantine nobility “but are aware of some heroic exemplarity.” “Their adventures are consummated as they turn the corners where destiny awaits.”
“They are them, they are others, they do not belong to me, and it is in the claim where they test my ability to invent them, a kind of common thread that comes and goes with no other commitment than that of writing,” said Luis Mateo Díez, academic. , author of 'The Kingdom of Celama', 'The Sidereal Elders', which is consecrated with this award, the highest institutional recognition of Hispanic literature.
He returned to his childhood as a child of war, a time that “dimmed my memory” and explained how listening to stories in the heat of the fire led him to the path of storytelling “and directed my destiny as a writer” and his first reading of Don Quixote, which is in the basement of all its characters.
“Don Quixote was not a hero that I could count alongside those in the comics, and in the few films that I could see at that time,” he said. A Don Quixote who returned as an antihero and loser “to stay with me as a hero no less disturbing than endearing.” Not in vain was the Cervantes awarded to him for “being one of the great narrators of the Castilian language, heir to the Cervantes spirit.”
Writer in the face of all adversity, creator of imaginary worlds and territories, he is the only author to have been awarded the National Prize for Fiction and Criticism twice. Also winner of the National Prize for Spanish Letters, he has held Chair I at the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) since 2000.
Celama
With his imaginary territory of Celama, Luis Mateo Díez created his world in the wake of Faulkner, García Márquez, Onetti or Benet. «A universe, -he said-, that has its only reason for being in what is written, in what Manuel Longares calls the life of the letter, exclusive matter of the same imaginary life, which owes its literary and verbal essence to the letter. ».
Already in the “twilight” phase of his literary life, “I now find myself literary, with the concern of an octogenarian of reasonable health, and awareness of the corresponding absences, since the age that seeks survival at the same time makes the course of disappearances,” he said. “Where I find myself is at some point in a work that, because it is prolific, can illuminate what, with repetition, enriches the world that contains it.” “If that world gains in complexity, which I hope so, without reiteration in any case implying repetition, that would be a sign of completion,” said a prolific author who today aspires for his work to have the “harmony of totality.” and “to nothing before posterity.”
“In an unparalleled Cervantes tradition, the work of Luis Mateo Díez stands out for its artistic quality, with a mastery of language, as evidenced by his writing, which brings us closer to the enigmatic behavior of the human being in multiple circumstances,” praised King Felipe VI to the winner. In each work he poses new challenges and expands his original imagination, increasing the legacy of the great storytellers of universal literature,” he added.
The King recalled 'The Fountain of Age' that Díez established as “an exceptional novelist.” He said that “among its narrative features, humor stands out” which, as the writer has declared, “is the best resource to relativize everything that happens, to wisely manage skepticism, and ensure that the tragic derives as much as possible into tragicomic.” ».
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, participated in the event. For the first time, the current Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, attended the ceremony and comprehensively described the winner's career. He praised him as a great conversationalist “endowed with the gift of knowing how to tell stories in the heat of the fire at the Filandón and an inveterate film buff.” “Fiction interests him more than life itself,” he concluded.
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