Their Majesties the King and Queen of Spain present 2014 Cervantes Prize to Juan Goytisolo

Main Hall of the University, Alcalá de Henares (Madrid)

The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport bestows the Miguel de Cervantes Award (125,000 euros) to those writers who contribute to enriching the Hispanic literary legacy, through works of outstanding quality. The prize was bestowed for the first time in 1976 to Jorge Guillén and since then there have been 39 prize-winners. In 1979, the Prize was given ex aequo to Jorge Luis Borges and Gerardo Diego. The rules subsequently stated that the prize may not be divided, declared void or awarded posthumously.

The panel

The panel that awarded the Cervantes Prize to Juan Goytisolo on 24 November was comprised of the following: José Manuel Caballero Bonald, author and laureate in 2012; Elena Poniatowska, author and laureate in 2013; Soledad Puértolas Villanueva, member appointed by the Spanish Royal Academy; Inmaculada Lergo Martín, by the Peruvian Academy of the Spanish Language; Fernando Galván Reula, by the Conference of Vice-Chancellors of Spanish Universities (Spanish acronym: CRUE); Carmen de Benavides, by the Union of Latin American Universities (Spanish acronym: UDUAL); Julio Martínez Mesanza, by the Director of the Cervantes Institute; Mercedes Monmany, by the Minister for Education, Culture and Sport; Fernando Segú y Martín, by the Spanish Federation of Journalists' Associations (Spanish acronym: FAPE); Jaime Reynaldo Iturri Salmón, by the Latin American Federation of Journalists (Spanish acronym: FELAP); and Elizabeth Marcela Pettinaroli, by the International Association of Hispanists.

According to the minutes, the panel awarded him the prize "for the investigatory capacity in language and complex stylistic ideas that he develops through various genres of literature; for his desire to merge the two extremes - the heterodoxy of Spanish tradition, on the one hand, and its permanent commitment to inter-cultural dialogue on the other".

Biography

Juan Goytisolo Gay (Barcelona, 1931) has lived away from Spain since he was very young. He arrived in Paris in 1956, where he worked as a literary consultant to the publishing house Gallimard. He later moved to the United States in 1969, where he became a professor at the university in La Jolla (California) and, subsequently, in Boston and New York. He currently resides in Marrakesh (Morocco).

Juan Goytisolo Gay forms part of the International Parliament of Writers and chairs the UNESCO panel that selects the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. A well-versed scholar of the Arab world, he contributed to revealing the reality of these peoples in Europe through numerous articles and essays. He worked towards the declaration by UNESCO of Djamaa el-Fna Square in Marrakesh as Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

His first novels - Juegos de manos (1954), Duelo en el paraíso (1955), and the trilogy comprising El circo (1947), Fiestas (1958) and La resaca (1958) - are considered part of critical realism. After the trilogy comprising Señas de identidad, Reivindicación del conde don Julián (today entitled Don Julián) and Juan sin Tierra, he broke away from the Spanish literary tradition that had existed until that point. Since then, he has not stopped exploring new paths and has published such novels as Makbara, Paisajes después de la batalla, Las virtudes del pájaro solitario, La cuarentena, La saga de los Marx, El sitio de los sitios, Carajicomedia and Telón de boca. In the 1980s, he published his two volumes of his autobiography entitled Coto vedado and En los reinos de taifa. He has also written such essays as El furgón de cola, Blanco White, Contracorrientes, Crónicas sarracinas and Aproximaciones a Gaudí en Capadocia.

His numerous journalistic collaborations have been gathered together in Pájaro que ensucia su propio nido and Contra las sagradas formas. He experienced the conflicts in Bosnia and Chechnya between 1993 and 1996 first hand, leading to a series of reports published in the newspaper El País.

Among other awards, he received the 2002 Octavio Paz Essay and Poetry Prize, the 2004 Juan Rulfo Prize, the 2008 Spanish National Literature Prize, the 2009 Tres Culturas Foundation Arts and Cultures Prize and the 2010 Spanish Literature Quijote Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Spanish Writers' Association (Spanish acronym: ACE).

The majority of his work has been translated into several languages including: English, French, German, Polish, Slovak and Romanian.