ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINA - PRINCE OF ASTURIAS, 2013, IN LITERATURE

PRINCE OF ASTURIAS FOUNDATION AWARDS IN LITERATURE 2013. Antonio Muñoz Molina.

Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, Cela, Uslar Pietri, Carlos Fuentes, Álvaro Mutis and even the people of Puerto Rico have been the Hispanic recipients of the literary award. Augusto Monterroso, from Honduras -and Guatemala and Mexico- was the last Hispanic, in 2000, to receive the coveted award of €50,000 or about $65,000.

 

The Prince of Asturias awards were established in 1980 and the foundation has  awardees like Paul Auster, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Doris Lessing among many other distinguished representatives from different countries.

I mentioned above that Augusto Monterroso, in 2000, was the last Spanish-speaking writer to receive the award. For 13 years others have been awarded: Auster, Roth, Miller, Oz, Margaret Atwood… and finally in 2013 the prize in literature has been bestowed on Antonio Muñoz Molina.

At present Antonio Muñoz Molina is probably the most international of all Spanish writers, who has a large following in Europe and America where his books have been translated into several languages: English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German. His titles include Sepharad, A Manuscript of Ashes, In the Night of Time, In her Absence, Windows of Manhattan… and many others.

Born in 1956 in Úbeda, Jaén, he attended the University of Granada where he obtained a degree in Art History. He later studied journalism in Madrid. Soon he started writing for the Madrid newspaper El País, where he is still a contributor. His first novel was entitled Beatus Ille, published in 1984. With El jinete polaco he won the coveted Planeta Prize in 1991. The translation of Sepharad won the translator, Margaret Peden, the PEN/Book-of-the-month-Club Translation Prize. In 1995 he was elected a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, Real Academia Española. Recently he was director of the Instituto Cervantes in New York, where he resides part of the year. He is, by the way, an admirer of the English language.

Muñoz Molina is a master in the art of writing. I don’t know this by hearsay or because I have just read his books, or simply because I enjoy what he types in his Blog… I know this first hand. I know it first hand because I had the audacity of asking him for a Prologue to a little book of mine on the art of writing in Spanish. This little book wants to emulate, in a Spanish version, what Strunk and White did in English: short, clear, to the point and with a no-nonsense approach. And Antonio Muñoz Molina, who had already lent me a hand a couple of times when I myself competed unsuccessfully for a Real Academia Award, wrote it for me.

Muñóz Molina went further than that. He showed me his stature as a human being and as a public figure: his humbleness, his attitude to all things relevant to mankind, his generosity proved to me that the more important the person is, the more approachable he is and the more willing to help.

Antonio Muñoz Molina wrote a prologue for my Escribir bien para torpes (Madrid: Anaya, 2013), that is a short essay on the art of writing well. My book may be forgotten, but his essay, “El nombre exacto de las cosas,” will long endure. Read it and you will understand what I mean.

I wish to thank Antonio Muñoz Molina for his prologue, for his novels, for his essays, for his warmth as a person, for his friendship and I recommend his writings without any reservations.

Congratulations to Premios Príncipe de Asturias and to Antonio Muñoz Molina. All those interested in ideas, in literature, in art and beauty –in Spanish and English- have a lot to celebrate the 25^th of October.