Juan Goytisolo, National Prize for Letters

The writer Juan Goytisolo (Barcelona, ​​1931) has today won the National Prize for Spanish Letters awarded by the Ministry of Culture in recognition of the literary career of a Spanish author. This award, one of the most prestigious of those awarded in Spain, is endowed with 40.000 euros and in its last edition it went to the writer Ana María Matute.

Archive photo of El Pais newspaper
Archive photo of El Pais newspaper

 

 

Goytisolo has cultivated essays, narratives, reports, travel literature and memoirs. Two of his most outstanding early novels, Signs of Identity (1966) and Juan sin Tierra (1975), earned him literary prestige. Among his latest books is El exilido de aqui y de puede. As an essayist, his work has been characterized by the extreme independence of his critical judgment, whether dealing with Western literature or society.

Born into an illustrious Barcelona family, Goytisolo grew up in the midst of the Civil War and suffered from the bombing of the Catalan capital, along with his brothers Luis, also a novelist, and José Agustín, a poet, who died in 1999. Trained in Law, at 25 years he went into exile in Paris. There he worked as an editorial consultant at the prestigious French publishing house Gallimard, before serving as a professor of literature at various American universities. He is a specialist in the Spanish picaresque novel of the XNUMXth century and in the work of the XNUMXth century author José Maria Blanco White.

The jury has been chaired by the general director of the Book, Rogelio Blanco, and has also been part of it, among others, Carmen Iglesias, José Carlos Mainer, Andrés Sorel, Julia Uceda, Bernardino Martínez Hernando, Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas, and the two last award-winning authors, Ana María Matute and Raúl Guerra Garrido.

Extracted from the article The Country Newspaper

Check the availability of the author's titles in the catalog the library of the IIE.

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