The Mexican writer Gonzalo Celorio, director of the Mexican Academy of the Spanish Language, is the new Cervantes Prize winner, the most important award in Hispanic literature, according to the announcement made by the Spanish Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun.
Celorio (Mexico City, 1948) was, before being a writer, one of the leading figures in Latin American literature studies from his position at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. His first novel, Amor propio (1991, published by Tusquets, like all his fiction works) was a chronicle of the counterculture years in Mexico, narrated with the experimental language of his generation. Since then, Celorio has published four more novels and a memoir, Mentideros de la memoria (2022). However, one of the most interesting aspects of Celorio's work lies in a borderland between Latin American cultural history and literary narrative. In Ensayo de contraconquista, for example, Celorio narrates his life through his intellectual and aesthetic obsessions: the baroque art that traveled from Spain to Cuba and Mexico, the writers that truly mattered in his formation (Alfonso Reyes, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and fantastic literature), and his relationship with the literature of his generation.
The Cervantes Prize jury recognizes in Celorio "the exceptional literary work and intellectual labor with which he has profoundly and consistently contributed to the enrichment of the Spanish language and Hispanic culture." Additionally, the jury points out that "over more than five decades, Gonzalo Celorio has consolidated a literary voice of remarkable elegance and reflective depth in which he combines critical lucidity with a narrative sensitivity that explores the nuances of identity, sentimental education, and loss. His work is at the same time a memory of modern Mexico and a mirror of the human condition."
Furthermore, the jury has highlighted that "in his books, irony, tenderness, and erudition resonate, tracing an emotional and cultural map that has influenced generations of readers and writers. Celorio represents the figure of the integral writer: creator, teacher, and passionate reader. He builds an invaluable legacy that honors the Spanish language and keeps it alive in its highest form: the word that thinks, feels, and endures."
The novel Y retiemble en sus centros la Tierra (1999) and the essay México, ciudad de papel (1997), a book written based on his acceptance speech at the Language Academy, are evidence of the virtues that the Cervantes Prize acknowledges in Celorio focused on Mexico City: the author's journey is erudite, eloquent, elegiac, and melancholic, moving between nightmare and epiphany. Mexico City in Celorio's work is presented in Y retiemble en sus centros la Tierra as the place that gives meaning to the protagonist's drunkenness, a university professor abandoned by his students. In México, ciudad de papel, the setting is a chorus of voices coming from the past that turns into a baroque labyrinth.Tres lindas cubanas (2008), on the other hand, is Celorio's book for his other country, Cuba, the island of his family. Once again, its pages link the novelistic plot with Cuba's history since the Revolution and the author's devotion to Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Eliseo Diego, and Dulce María Loynaz.
There is something else relevant in Celorio's figure: from his academic work and his literary work, the new Cervantes Prize winner has approached Hispanic culture as a whole, where the sense of community weighs much more than grievances. In 2019, at the International Congress of the Spanish Language in Córdoba, Argentina, Celorio responded to then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had demanded that Spain apologize historically for the conquest. Celorio said that those apologies made no sense because "there has been such a strong process of spiritual conquest that we Mexicans are, in a way, responsible for the marginalization suffered by the indigenous people."
Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Sergio Pitol, José Emilio Pacheco, Elena Poniatowska, and Fernando del Paso were the previous Mexican winners of the Cervantes Prize in 50 years of history. In comparison, Celorio is closer to Pacheco and Paz than to Poniatowska and Fuentes. His literature is urban, sometimes mystical and erudite, resembling more surrealistic poetry and jazz than journalism. It is also a literature that projects the academic's perspective on the cultural history of the Hispanic world. An unconventional view, full of doors connecting critical texts with memoirs. The essays collected in El viaje sedentario (2002) are evidence that links memories of Mixcoac, the neighborhood of his childhood in Mexico City, with his reading of the history of avant-gardes in Latin America.
The last winner of the Cervantes Prize was the philosopher, writer, and member of the Royal Spanish Academy Álvaro Pombo. Among the recipients of the most prestigious award in Spanish literature are also the current Princess of Asturias Award winner, Eduardo Mendoza (2016), Juan Goytisolo (2014), Ana María Matute (2010), and Francisco Umbral (2000).
The Cervantes Prize was created in 1975 and is awarded to a writer whose literary work is written, entirely or essentially, in this language. Candidates can be nominated by the Spanish language academies, authors awarded in previous editions, institutions linked to Spanish-language literature by nature, purpose, or content, and jury members.
The jury is composed of the last two winners of the Prize, a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, another from one of the Ibero-American Academies of the Spanish Language, seven personalities from the academic, university, and literary worlds, including members of the Conference of Rectors of Spanish and Latin American Universities, the director of the Cervantes Institute, the Minister of Culture, members of the Spanish College Association of Writers, the Spanish Association of Literary Critics, and a writers' association from the Latin American region designated by the Regional Center for Book Promotion in Latin America and the Caribbean (Cerlalc).
Also part of the jury that selects the most outstanding creator in the Spanish language are two members chosen from representatives of cultural supplements of newspapers, proposed respectively by the Federation of Associations of Journalists of Spain, a major journalists' association in Latin America, and a member proposed by the International Association of Hispanists, of non-Spanish or Ibero-American nationality.
Since its creation, the Prize is announced at the end of the year and presented around April 23, the day of Miguel de Cervantes' death, at the Paraninfo of the University of Alcalá de Henares, the writer's birthplace, by the Spanish Monarchs.