Álvaro Pombo (Santander, 1939) wins the 2024 Cervantes Prize, the highest recognition for literature in the Spanish language. This well-deserved award highlights his brilliant literary career, marked by a work that has captivated generations of readers with its depth, wit and unique style.
Photo: Juanma Serrano / Europa Press
The jury highlighted his “extraordinary creative personality, his unique lyricism and his original narration”, and also noted that in his creations “he shows the world through the construction of a language in which the deformations of reality appear reflected under the disguise of irony and humor.”
His narrative, which has fundamental titles such as The Hero of the Mansards of Mansard, Where the Women, The Quadrature of the Circle or The Sky, has won many of the most important awards on the Spanish scene (Herralde, Crítica, Nacional, Ciudad of Barcelona, Fastenrath, Fundación José Manuel Lara, Salambó, Planeta, Nadal) and is articulated around concepts such as “lack of substance” or “psychology-fiction”, and characters affected by feelings often hidden, repressed or imposed.
Between the disengagement and pessimism of Eliot and the incessant praise of Rilke, his stories trace with great depth and beauty, through an inimitable style marked by orality, human relationships, similarities and (dis)similarities, loneliness and the distance, invisibility and loss of a concept as hackneyed as “love.”
In 2013 he published Stories about the lack of substance and other stories in the collection Letras Hispánicas of Ediciones Cátedra. The writer himself has given a title and dedication to this volume, which includes those he gathered in Stories about the lack of substance (1977) and Recycled Stories (1997), as well as El pésame (1992).
