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Miguel de Cervantes Prize
Presented by	Ministry of Culture
Country	Spain
Reward	€125,000
First awarded	1976

The Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spanish: Premio de Literatura en Lengua Castellana Miguel de Cervantes), established in 1976, is awarded annually to honour the lifetime achievement of an outstanding writer in the Spanish language. The prize is similar to the Booker Prize, with its candidates from Commonwealth countries, in that it rewards authors from any Spanish-speaking nation. Unlike the Booker Prize, it is awarded only once in recognition of the recipient's overall body of work and is therefore regarded as a sort of Spanish-language Nobel Prize in Literature. The award is named after Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote.

The candidates are proposed by the Association of Spanish Language Academies, and the prize is awarded by the Ministry of Culture of Spain. The winner receives a monetary award of 125,000 euros, it is one of the richest literary prizes in the world and one of the most prestigious in the Spanish language.^[1]

Winners[link]

Year	Winner		Country[A]
1976		Jorge Guillén	Spain
1977	75px	Alejo Carpentier	Cuba
1978		Dámaso Alonso	Spain
1979[2]		Jorge Luis Borges	Argentina
		Gerardo Diego	Spain
1980	75px	Juan Carlos Onetti	Uruguay
1981	75px	Octavio Paz	Mexico
1982		Luis Rosales	Spain
1983		Rafael Alberti	Spain
1984		Ernesto Sabato	Argentina
1985		Gonzalo Torrente Ballester	Spain
1986		Antonio Buero Vallejo	Spain
1987		Carlos Fuentes	Mexico
1988		María Zambrano	Spain
1989	75px	Augusto Roa Bastos	Paraguay
1990		Adolfo Bioy Casares	Argentina
1991		Francisco Ayala	Spain
1992		Dulce María Loynaz	Cuba
1993		Miguel Delibes	Spain
1994		Mario Vargas Llosa	Peru
1995		Camilo José Cela	Spain
1996		José García Nieto	Spain
1997		Guillermo Cabrera Infante	Cuba
1998		José Hierro	Spain
1999		Jorge Edwards	Chile
2000		Francisco Umbral	Spain
2001		Álvaro Mutis	Colombia
2002		José Jiménez Lozano	Spain
2003		Gonzalo Rojas	Chile
2004		Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio	Spain
2005		Sergio Pitol	Mexico
2006		Antonio Gamoneda	Spain
2007		Juan Gelman	Argentina
2008		Juan Marsé	Spain
2009		José Emilio Pacheco	Mexico
2010		Ana María Matute	Spain
2011		Nicanor Parra	Chile

Winners per country[link]

Spain	19
Argentina	4
Mexico	4
Chile	3
Cuba	3
Colombia	1
Paraguay	1
Peru	1
Uruguay	1
Total	37

Similar prizes in other languages[link]

• Camões Prize (for Portuguese-language literature)
• Georg Büchner Prize (for German-language literature)
• Newman Prize for Chinese Literature (for Chinese-language literature)
• Man Booker Prize (for English-language literature)

For a more comprehensive overview a list of literary awards is available.

Notes and references[link]

External links[link]

• Miguel de Cervantes Prize at the Ministry of Culture
• Miguel de Cervantes Prize El poder de la palabra (Spanish)

Nicanor Parra Sandoval (born September 5, 1914) is a Chilean mathematician and poet born in San Fabián de Alico, Chile, who has been considered to be a popular poet in Chile with enormous influence and popularity in Latin America, and also considered one of the most important poets of the Spanish language literature.^[1] He describes himself as an "anti-poet," due to his distaste for standard poetic pomp and function—after recitations he would exclaim Me retracto de todo lo dicho, or, "I take back everything I said".

Life[link]

Parra comes from the artistically prolific Chilean Parra family of performers, musicians, artists, and writers. His sister, Violeta Parra, is possibly the most important folk singer the nation has produced.

Nicanor Parra was born in 1914 near Chillán, a city in southern Chile, the son of a schoolteacher.^[2] In 1933, he entered the Instituto Pedagógico of the University of Chile, and qualified as a teacher of mathematics and physics in 1938, one year after his first book appeared: Cancionero sin Nombre. After teaching in Chilean secondary schools, he went in 1943 to Brown University in the U.S. to continue his studies in physics. and then he went in 1948 to Oxford in England to study cosmology. He returned to Chile as professor at the University in 1946. Since 1952, Parra has been professor of theoretical physics in Santiago and has read his poetry in England, France, Russia, Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. He has published several books.

Trying to get away from the conventions of poetry, Parra's poetic language renounces the refinement of most Latin American literature and adopts a more colloquial tone. His first collection, Poemas y Antipoemas (1954) is a classic of Latin American literature, one of the most influential Spanish poetry collections of the twentieth century, and is cited as an inspiration by American Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg.^[3][4]

Awards[link]

Parra has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.^{[citation needed]}

On December 1, 2011, Parra won the Cervantes Prize from Spain's Ministry of Culture, the most important literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world.^[5][6]

List of works[link]

• Cancionero sin nombre (Songbook without a Name), 1937.
• Poemas y antipoemas (Poems and Antipoems), 1954; Nascimento, 1956; Cátedra, 2005, ISBN 978-84-376-0777-1
• La cueca larga (The Long Cueca), 1958.
• Versos de salón (Parlor Verses), 1962.
• Manifiesto (Manifesto), 1963.
• Canciones rusas (Russian Songs), 1967.
• Obra gruesa (Thick Works), 1969.
• Los profesores (The Teachers), 1971.
• Artefactos (Artifacts), 1972.
• Sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui (Sermons and Teachings of the Christ of Elquí), 1977.
• Nuevos sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui (New Sermons and Teachings of the Christ of Elquí), 1979.
• El anti-Lázaro (The Anti-Lazarus), 1981.
• Plaza Sésamo (Sesame Street), 1981.
• Poema y antipoema de Eduardo Frei (Poem and Antipoem of Eduardo Frei), 1982.
• Cachureos, ecopoemas, guatapiques, últimas prédicas, 1983.
• Chistes para desorientar a la policía (Jokes to Confuse the Police), 1983.
• Coplas de Navidad (Christmas Couplets), 1983.
• Poesía política (Political Poetry), 1983.
• Hojas de Parra (Grape Leaves / Pages of Parra (Spanish pun)), 1985.
• Nicanor Parra: biografía emotiva (Nicanor Parra: Emotional Biography), Ediciones Rumbos, 1988
• Poemas para combatir la calvicie (Poems to Combat Baldness), 1993.
• Páginas en blanco (White Pages), 2001.
• Lear Rey & Mendigo (King Lear and the Beggar), 2004.
• Obras completas I & algo + (Complete Works and More), 2006.
• Discursos de Sobremesa, 2006, transl. Dave Oliphant, After Dinner Declarations, Host Publications, Inc., 2009.

English translations

• Poems and antipoems: Edited by Miller Williams. Translators: Fernando Alegría and others. New Directions Pub. Corp., 1967
• Nicanor Parra: Poems and Antipoems, ed. David Unger, New Directions, 1985, ISBN 978-0-8112-0959-5
• Antipoems: how to look better & feel great. Translator Liz Werner. New Directions Publishing. 2004. ISBN 978-0-8112-1597-8. http://books.google.com/books?id=GUExp_HZBucC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Nicanor+Parra&hl=en&ei=zXrZTvr2BqT1sQKInsCBDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false. 
• After-dinner declarations. Translator Dave Oliphant. Host Publications, Inc.. 2009. ISBN 978-0-924047-63-3. http://books.google.com/books?id=d-2WRDHZILIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Nicanor+Parra&hl=en&ei=zXrZTvr2BqT1sQKInsCBDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false. 

References[link]

Poetry portal

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Nicanor Parra

• Nicanor Parra Official Web Site
• Nicanor Parra website at the Universidad de Chile
• Nicanor Parra: De los Antipoemas a los Artefactos Dramáticos - Madrid
• La Antipoesía de Parra y el lenguaje del artefacto UNESCO
• El Proyecto de la Antipoesía de Nicanor Parra
• Nicanor Parra en Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes
• Nicanor Parra: Antipoemas, parodias y lenguajes híbridos. De la Antipoesía al lenguaje del Artefacto | Premio Cervantes 2011 - Universidad Complutense de Madrid - UCM - PDF Adolfo Vásquez Rocca PH.D.

Ana María Matute

Ana María Matute Ausejo (born 26 July 1926) is an internationally acclaimed Spanish author. She is one of the strongest voices from the posguerra, or period immediately following the Spanish Civil War. She studied at the international school of Hilversum in the Netherlands.

Biography[link]

Matute was born in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, the second of five children in a conservative middle class family. Her father, Facundo Matute, owned an umbrella factory and has been credited with inspiring his daughter's creativity. Matute spent a considerable amount of time in Madrid during her childhood as well, but few of her stories are set there.^[1]

At the age of four she almost died from a chronic kidney infection, and was taken to live with her grandparents in Mansilla de la Sierra, a small town in the mountains, for a period of recovery. Matute says that she was profoundly influenced by the villagers whom she met during her time there. This influence can be seen in such works as those published in the 1961 anthology Historias de la Artamila ("Stories about the Artamila", all of which deal with the people that Matute met during her recovery). Settings reminiscent of that town are also often used as settings for her other work.^[2]

She was almost ten years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and this conflict is said to have had the greatest impact on Matute's writing. She considered not only "the battles between the two factions, but also the internal aggression within each one".^[1] The war resulted in Francisco Franco's rise to power, starting in 1936 and escalating until 1939, when he took control of the entire country. Franco established a dictatorship which lasted thirty-six years, until his death in 1975. The violence brought on by the war continued through much of his reign. Since Matute matured as a writer in this posguerra period under Franco's oppressive regime, some of the most recurrent themes in her works are violence, alienation, misery, and especially the loss of innocence.^[1][2]

Matute is currently a university professor. She travels in various countries, especially the United States, as a lecturer. She is outspoken about subjects such as the benefits of emotional suffering, the constant changing of a human being, and how innocence is never completely lost.

Awards and honors[link]

• Premio Miguel de Cervantes 2010 (Miguel de Cervantes Prize)
• Premio Nadal (Nadal Prize)
• Premio Nacional de Literatura (National Literature Prize)
• Premio de Literatura Infantil (Prize of Children's Literature)
• Premio Planeta (Planeta Prize)
• Premio de la Crítica (Critics' Prize)
• Premio "Cafe Gijón"
• Hispanic Society of America
• American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese

She was made a member of the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy) in 1996. She was the third woman to be elected as a member of the RAE.

Select List of Works[link]

• En esta tierra
• Los Abel
• El arrepentido y otras narraciones
• Pequeño teatro
• Los hijos muertos
• Fiesta al noroeste (Fiesta al noroeste)
• Historias de la Artamila
• Algunos muchachos
• The semiautobiographical trilogy Los mercaderes:
  • Primera memoria
  • La trampa
  • Los soldados lloran de noche
• Luciérnagas
• Olvidado rey Gudú
• Aranmanoth (novel, 2000)
• El árbol de oro
• Los Chicos
• Rafael
• El ausente
• Bernardino
• La Conciencia
• El Salvamento
• Navidad para Carnavalito
• La Rama Seca
• Paraíso inhabitado
• El Polizón Del Ulises (novel,1965) (Premio Lazarillo)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official Website promoting Spanish culture in English language

Ana María (17 May 1929 – 6 April 1983) was the "nom de guerre" of Mélida Anaya Montes, the second in command of the FMLN, in El Salvador.

An intellectual, she was considered as an icon among revolutionary women in the region. Eventually she was killed by her own comrades on April 6, 1983 in Managua, Nicaragua, after having made many sacrifices during her life as a guerrilla.

Later, the FMLN falsely blamed its leader Cayetano Carpio (sometimes referred to as the "Ho Chi Minh of Latin America") as the person responsible for the crime, and he committed suicide.

Early life[link]

She was born in the small town of Santiago Texacuangos, in the central zone of El Salvador. Ana María received her Doctorate of Education from the University of El Salvador, where she became a professor of education and gave classes in the Sixties. She was the assistant director of Alberto Masferrer University.

At the end of the 1960s, she became one of the main leaders of the Gremial Association "ANDES 21 de Junio" (National Association of Salvadoran Teachers 21 of June). She led the strikes of professors of 1968 and 1971, which created major trouble for the government of general Fidel Sanchez Hernandez.

In 1970, the ex-Secretary General of the Communist Party of El Salvador, Salvador Cayetano Carpio founded the first guerrilla detachment of El Salvador: The Popular Forces of Liberacion Farabundo Martí (FPL).

Death[link]

On April 6, 1983, Ana Maria was murdered at her home in Managua, Nicaragua. Her assassins stabbed her 8 times with an ice pick, 'to make it look like a brutal act of the Salvadorean right wing.' Nicaraguan authorities later apprehended the murderers and found them to be members of the FMLN. The murder was caused by a deep division that had developed within the FMLN. A conciliatory faction, which favored negotiation, was led by Ana Maria and Salvador Cayetano Carpio. The hard line faction opposed negotiation with the government of El Salvador, and supported a prolonged war. This faction was led by Rogelio Bazzaglia, who confessed to Ana Maria's murder.

Legacy[link]

Ana María continues to serve as an iconic example for educators and those struggling against oppression, especially in El Salvador. The Melida Anaya Montes Language School in San Salvador, which uses popular education techniques highlights social justice issues, is named for her.

See also[link]

• History of El Salvador
• Comandante Clelia

External links[link]

• FMLN (in Spanish)
• Melida Anaya Montes Language School

This Salvadoran biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

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The Most Excellent The Countess of Murillo GE, DBE
3rd President of Madrid
Incumbent
Assumed office 17 October 2003
Monarch	Juan Carlos I
Preceded by	Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón
President of the Spanish Senate
In office 9 February 1999 – 16 October 2002
Preceded by	Juan Ignacio Barrero
Succeeded by	Juan José Lucas
Personal details
Born	Esperanza Aguirre y Gil de Biedma (1952-01-03) 3 January 1952 (age 60) Madrid, Spain
Nationality	Spanish
Political party	People's Party
Other political affiliations	Liberal Party People's Alliance
Spouse(s)	Fernando Ramírez de Haro, 15th Count of Murillo
Children	Fernando Ramírez de Haro, 10th Marquis of Villanueva del Duero Álvaro, 16th Count of Villariezo
Alma mater	Complutense University
Profession	Civil Servant
Website	www.esperanzaaguirre.org

Esperanza Aguirre y Gil de Biedma, Countess of Murillo, Grandee of Spain, DBE (born 3 January 1952) is a Spanish politician and the current President of Madrid. She is President of Madrid's People's Party and the first female politician to have held the office of President of the Senate and Minister of Education and Culture in Spanish democratic history.

Aguirre is a former member of Unión Liberal, Partido Liberal and Popular Alliance, which changed its name to Partido Popular (People's Party) in 1989. Since her early years she has been a member of the Club Liberal of Madrid, which was presided over by an economics professor at the Complutense University, Pedro Schwartz.^{[citation needed]} Schwartz reportedly played an important role in the beginnings of Aguirre's political career: in 1983, he was the one to convince her, by then a civil servant, to stand in the Madrid local elections of that year for Schwartz's Liberal Union and become a councilwoman.^[1]

Early years (1952-1974)[link]

Aguirre was born in Madrid into a family Spanish nobility, being the eldest daughter of José Luis Aguirre Borrell, a lawyer, and Piedad Gil de Biedma y Vega de Seoane, daughter of José Gil de Biedma, 3rd Count of Sepúlveda. She is a niece of the late Catalan poet, Jaime Gil de Biedma. She studied in the "La Asunción" School and in the British Council School of Madrid and earned a degree in Law in Complutense University (Madrid) in 1974. She is fluent in English and French.

Administrative career (1974-1982)[link]

Aguirre joined the Technical Division of the Ministry of Information and Tourism as a civil servant in 1976. She was head of the Department of Publicity and Tourism, where she remained until 1979. Subsequently, she had many different jobs in the Ministry of Culture, serving several Ministers during the Democratic Centre Union governments; especially designated by the Prime Minister himself. In 1979, she was chief of staff of the General Director of Literature and Cinematography. She was appointed Deputy General Director of Studies of the Technical General Secretariat of the Ministry of Culture in 1980. In 1981, she was appointed Deputy General Director in the Advisory Staff of the Secretary of State of Culture. Her last position with the Administration was as Deputy General Director of Cultural Associations.

Councillor of Madrid (1983-1996)[link]

Esperanza Aguirre first became a councillor with the defunct Coalición Popular, in which she was a member of the smaller Unión Liberal. Between 1983 and 1986 she held a seat on Madrid City Council as a member of Coalición Popular. While in opposition, she was a member of the Standing Committee of the City Council, a CP spokeswoman on the areas of Culture, Education, Youth and Sports Affairs, and the Moncloa district. When Unión Liberal merged with Partido Liberal, in December 1984, she held different positions in the National Executive and the Political Council of José Antonio Segurado's Partido Liberal.

In 1987 she left the Partido Liberal and joined Popular Alliance, which later became the People's Party. She was subsequently re-elected to the city council and continued in opposition until 1989, when a successful vote of no confidence ousted the socialist mayor Juan Barranco, which allowed the People's Party and Democratic and Social Centre to govern Madrid for the first time since the restoration of democracy in 1977. In the new local executive, she was designated head of the Department of the Environment.

In 1991, under José María Álvarez del Manzano, the People's Party won a council majority and Aguirre was again appointed to the Environment Department. Two years later, she was designated as Head of the Culture Department and controlled the areas of Sports, Education and Hygiene. In 1995 she became the spokeswoman of People's Party in Madrid City Council and was appointed by the City Council to the Caja Madrid Board of Governors.

Minister of Education, Culture and Sports (1996-1999)[link]

In the general election of 1996 she was the candidate for the Senate for Madrid of the People's Party, after her designation as a member of the National Executive Committee of the Party; and she became a senator. The then new President, José María Aznar, appointed her to be Minister of Education, Culture and Sports. She was succeeded in those posts in 1999 by Mariano Rajoy. During this period she became very famous because of sense of humour.

President of the Senate (1999-2002)[link]

Aguirre, a Senator since 1996, was elected President of the Senate in February 1999, the first woman to do so. In March 2000, she was re-elected Senator for Madrid, becoming the top-voted candidate in Spain with 1.55 million votes and 50.7% of the popular vote, a percentage record still unbroken.^[2] She resigned in 2002 to run for the Presidency of the Autonomous Community of Madrid in the regional Assembly elections of 2003. She was substituted as President of the Senate by Juan José Lucas.

President of the Community of Madrid (2003-)[link]

Esperanza Aguirre welcoming participants at the 2010 Horasis Global India Business Meeting.

First regional elections of 2003 and the dissenting deputies of PSOE[link]

When the regional elections took place in May 2003, the People's Party won a plurality of seats. The People's Party won 55 seats in the Madrid Assembly, being the only party of the right in the Assembly. On the left, PSOE won 47 seats and United Left won 9 seats, thus making it possible for a coalition of PSOE and IU to rule.

However, the election of a leftist coalition was not possible due to two dissenting deputies of the PSOE, Eduardo Tamayo and María Teresa Sáez, who refused to obey the party whip in the first two votes, the election of the speaker and the election of the president.^{[citation needed]} Most leftist politicians and several media organs accused Tamayo and Sáez of being bribed into breaking party discipline by prominent members of the PP, following accusations that the hotel rooms they were hiding in had been paid for by businessmen from the construction industry with links to the PP.^{[citation needed]} This theory was dismissed after a parliamentary investigation and was never proven.^{[citation needed]}

Esperanza Aguirre during May 2011 regional elections.

Second regional elections of 2003[link]

In October 2003, following the scandal of the dissenting deputies, the regional elections were rerun. The People's Party won a majority of seats, which enabled Aguirre to became President of Madrid.^{[citation needed]}

Aguirre's most important achievements in those years^[when?] were the reduction of surgery waiting times, the building of eight new hospitals and 87 new state schools (most of them bilingual), an increase in the investment for several scholarships of education, and the expansion of the Underground to suburban areas such as Pozuelo de Alarcón.^{[citation needed]}

Damehood[link]

In February 2004, Aguirre was appointed Honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She is the first Spanish woman to date to have been awarded this honour.

Mumbai[link]

Aguirre was one of the many civilians trapped in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai on 26 November 2008, but she managed to escape unharmed.

Family[link]

Aguirre married in Madrid, on 1 January 1974, Fernando Ramírez de Haro, 15th Count of Murillo, Grandee of Spain, elder son of Ignacio Ramírez de Haro, 15th Count of Bornos, Grandee of Spain, and his wife Beatriz Valdés, 4th Marquise of Casa Valdés. They have two sons:

• Fernando Ramírez de Haro, 10th Marquis of Villanueva del Duero, Grandee of Spain, (b. 23 August 1976).

• Álvaro Ramírez de Haro, 16th Count of Villariezo, (b. 4 April 1980).

Ancestry[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Esperanza Aguirre

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Esperanza Aguirre

• Latest news over Esperanza Aguirre (English)
• Official biography of Esperanza Aguirre (Spanish)
• Helicopter accident on YouTube (Spanish)

v t e List of the current presidents of the autonomous communities of Spain Andalusia: Griñán (PSOE) Aragon: Rudi (PP) Asturias: Fernández (PSOE) Balearic Islands: Bauzà (PP) Basque Country: López (PSOE) Canary Islands: Rivero (CC) Cantabria: Diego (PP) Castile–La Mancha: Cospedal (PP) Castile and León: Herrera (PP) Catalonia: Mas (CiU) Extremadura: Monago (PP) Galicia: Núñez Feijóo (PP) La Rioja: Sanz (PP) Community of Madrid: Aguirre (PP) Region of Murcia: Valcárcel (PP) Navarre: Barcina (UPN) Valencian Community: Fabra (PP) Ceuta:1 Vivas (PP) Melilla:1 Imbroda (PP) 1 Autonomous cities.