The Cervantes Prize acknowledges the melancholic have a look at the reminiscence of the Mexican Gonzalo Celorio | Culture | EUROtoday

The melancholic have a look at the reminiscence of the Mexican author Gonzalo Celorio (Mexico City, 1948) obtained the 2025 Cervantes Prize this Monday. This was introduced by the Spanish Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, on the ministry’s headquarters in Madrid. An award that goes to the essayist, author and critic “for his exceptional literary work, profound and sustained by Hispanic culture,” famous the jury, which highlights that Celorio “combines a critical lucidity that explores sentimental identity and loss.” Celorio thus wins the best award for literature within the Spanish language, created in 1976 and endowed with 125,000 euros. The award can be offered on April 23 on the University of Alcalá de Henares.

The jury on this version has been made up, amongst others, of the final two winners of the award in 2023 and 2024, the writers and language lecturers Luis Mateo Díez and Álvaro Pombo, respectively; the tutorial Aura Egido, the critic Constantino Bértolo and the author Manuel Rico, in addition to Mauricio Carrera representing the Union of Universities of Latin America and the Caribbean (UDUALC).

The awarding of the award to the Mexican author appears to be a brand new cultural gesture in the direction of Mexico, when relations between each nations have been at a low level following former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s demand for a pardon from Spain for the excesses of the conquest. In mid-October, the Princess of Asturias Foundation offered the Concord recognition to the National Museum of Anthropology and the Arts to the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide.

Celorio is without doubt one of the most distinguished essayists, narrators and lecturers of up to date Mexican literature. His work is characterised, as he himself has acknowledged, by a deep love of language and a melancholic have a look at reminiscence. Celorio has outlined his works as “memorial novels,” as a result of in them he delves into household historical past, but additionally in regards to the life and creations of writers with whom he has interacted.

In his most up-to-date guide, That pile of damaged mirrors (Tusquets), the author has determined to speak about his personal life, in a memoir by which he delves into his literary vocation, his mental coaching and his educational work. The title of the work, the writer explains in his prologue, is a verse by Borges that for him “correctly defines memory.” Celorio narrates: “This book accumulates scattered memories that are reflections of some sections of my life. And only reflections, because language, inescapably and paradoxically, distorts what it intends to retain in memory, even more so if what it is trying to preserve occurred in remote times. But in no way have I intended to make an autobiography; if anything, just record certain significant aspects of my life.” It is, he provides, a compendium of what he defines as his “exultant passions”: “The word, literature, theater, popular music, parties, celebrations, domestic rituals, the baroque, architecture, teaching, friendship, love and its simulacra.”

The guide begins exactly with a melancholic evocation of maturity, at 72 years previous, that “so-feared winter.” He remembers his father, who died on the age of 70. “Now I am older than he ever was. It is true that, like him, I spend most of my life in solitude, sitting at my desk, concocting useless texts, ruminating on dusty readings or inventing fables that surely others have already written,” he writes in a lyrical or “poetic” method, as some consultants have outlined his model. Despite having reached that “winter” of maturity, Celorio remembers that he’s nonetheless energetic, instructing educational programs—“absorbing the youthful blood of my students,” he notes—and writing. “I have not retired nor do I plan to do so until my strength or my lucidity fail, as I have more projects in my head than I have the capacity to carry them out,” warns the author who practices tai chi and who, he says, “every day I bathe, shave and get dressed, even though I don’t have to leave the house.”

It is the passion for all times and the curiosity that every day brings for this educational educated in Letters on the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the place he has been a professor, director of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and member of the Philological Research Institute. Celorio has devoted his life to fascinated with and instructing Mexican literature. He has additionally been director of the Mexican Academy of Language, the place he has promoted the care and renewal of the language.

The author achieved extensive recognition with Self-love (1992) y And the Earth trembles in its facilities (1999), autobiographical novels that mix irony, reminiscence and social criticism. He devoted his trilogy An exemplary household to its origins, delving into that previous from “the minaret of anonymity in which I was placed eleventh in the prolific offspring of my parents. Inevitably, he warns, I have narrated, in the first person, several episodes of my childhood and some of my youth, but I am not the protagonist of these works.” It is, say its critics, a cultured and chic prose that oscillates between erudition and private confession.

Irony just isn’t solely current in his work, but additionally within the feedback he makes about his work: “I have been fortunate to dedicate myself to literature, which is useless, but which has been a luxury that I have enjoyed throughout my life,” he advised the Mexican newspaper in 2010. The Day. A ardour for literature that started in his childhood: “I believe that every writer is, before anything else, a reader and I was fortunate to be a precocious reader from a very young age; I had a taste for the spoken and written word,” he recalled. “I alternated the pleasure of reading and the enthusiasm for writing. I have dedicated myself to this which – as I say – is of no use, but is truly a wonderful luxury, to which fortunately I have had the opportunity to dedicate myself for life,” he acknowledged.

In the final two years, the Cervantes was awarded to Spanish authors, one thing that broke the standard alternation between Spanish and Ibero-American authors, which within the final decade has grow to be each two years. The two earlier winners of Luis Mateo Díez have been the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas (2022) and the Uruguayan author Cristina Peri Rossi (2021). In the 2020 and 2019 editions, the Spanish poets Francisco Brines and Joan Margarit gained, respectively, whereas in 2018 and 2017 the Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale and the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez gained. The candidates for this award are proposed by the plenary session of the Royal Spanish Academy, by the Language Academies of Spanish-speaking nations and by the winners of previous editions. This yr’s functions closed on October 21.