The jury of the ‘Miguel de Cervantes’ Literature Prize in the Spanish Language, corresponding to 2024, has chosen the Cantabrian Álvaro Pombo as the winner of this year’s edition. The prize is worth 125,000 euros and is the most prestigious award for literature in Spanish.
These are the main works of the Cantabrian writer:
‘The Mansard Hero of Mansard’ (1983). The awarding of the Herralde Prize to this novel in 1983 showed one of the options that the literature of the eighties had to take, but also the very personal way in which Álvaro Pombo consolidated his style. It is a style in which what was suggested took precedence over what was said, the latent surpassed the visible. A psychological ambiguity, also a moral one, emerges in a string of accomplished characters such as the boy KusKús, the servant Julián, the extravagant aunt Eugenia, where almost nothing is what it seems, and an underground of latent passions emerges, when betrayal, homosexuality , secrets translate unstable atmospheres that are more suggested than developed.
‘Where the women’ (1996). This novel stands out for being one of the first to explore complex female characters. Nines, Aunt Lucía, the narrator’s mother, all are seen from a point of view that breaks the conventional images of a pretended but false superiority. The topics of the feminine world are seen by a narrator who confronts them, providing the keys to what will be the layout of a frieze of unmistakable women throughout her later work.
‘A window to the north’ (2004). This novel, which narrates the Cristero Revolution in Mexico, is not just a historical novel; Above the historical truth emerges that of fiction starring in this work by Isabel de la Hoz and Ubaldo Zamacois. She is an exalted romantic heroine, unconventional, choosing her own destiny, and he is a sibylline and selfish priest, capable of any metamorphosis in the defense of his survival as a guest, and his bourgeois love.
‘Against nature’ (2005). I highlight this novel because in it, for the first time, homosexuality is treated as a deep introspection in a difficulty that is at the same time social and psychological, from a deep respect for the two creatures represented, Javier Salazar and Paco Alledén. It is a novel where religious issues also emerge, which makes it very representative of the ‘Pombian’ universe.
‘The Fortune of Matilda Turpin’ (2006). With this novel, which won the Planeta Prize, Pombo reaches the general public. To understand it, spaces are fundamental. Always within a very English setting, physically and socially, with the persistent rain of a northern autumn, and a landscape of cliffs and rough seas that, at the same time, isolate the protagonists even more (the trips to the town are minimal and functional), serves to connect with Brönte, with ‘Wuthering Heights’, but also and, above all, with the entire saga of the English novel that defines a social space and a psychological entity.
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