Magdalena Tsanis and Carmen Naranjo
Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), April 23 (EFE).- The image of the prickly pear surrounding the Mexican Gonzalo Celorio and singing ‘Ay, Jalisco’ in the courtyard of the Auditorium of the University of Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) has been the culmination of the 2025 Cervantes Prize, a ceremony that has united Spain and Mexico and which the kings have presided over.
This brotherhood, which Felipe VI emphasized in his speech, has been celebrated by rewarding a writer with Spanish and Cuban ancestors, whose work delves into family memory and transgresses the borders of genres.
The stories of his family’s emigration and exile but also “of outrageous bonanzas and cunning theft, of unspeakable vices and alienating amnesias” have featured in his speech, which has sounded loud and clear, despite the throat problems he suffers as a result of cancer.
Celorio, who came accompanied by his wife, a brother, a son and a grandson, began with an emotional memory of his father on his deathbed, 64 years ago, and the moment he said goodbye to him; He was the last of the twelve brothers who make up his family to do so and he told him: “You will get there, son (…). If you can’t, I’ll push you.”
He has also remembered his mother, a fervent reader, who once, when another of the writer’s brothers was struggling between life and death due to peritonitis, promised the Virgin of Perpetual Help that, if she saved him, he would stop reading novels for five years, the greatest sacrifice he could offer.
He has mentioned his grandfather, who left a hamlet in Asturias (in Vibaño) in the mid-19th century to “do the Americas” and his maternal grandmother, born in Havana “when it was a Spanish province.” He has also revealed about his father that he wrote his mother a love letter every day, even if they were both at home.
“His life and career remind us that Mexico and Spain are more than brother countries: they are cultures intertwined by language and culture, united by a sincere closeness and a shared affection that lasts over time,” said Felipe VI.
Much of Celorio’s family anthology and his “narrative poetics” have been captured in the trilogy consisting of ‘Tres lindas cubanas’ (2006), ‘El metal y la escoria’ (2014) and ‘Los apóstatas’ (2020), edited by Tusquets.
Among those attending the ceremony, the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the writer and director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, other writers and academics such as Sergio Ramírez, Luis Mateo Díez (Cervantes Prize 2023) and the director of the RAE, Santiago Muñoz Machado.
The seventh Mexican to receive the highest distinction in Hispanic literature has also emphasized in his speech this twinning between countries by ensuring that “Mexican nationality cannot be dissociated from Spanish history and culture” and that “Mexico is a substantial part of what Carlos Fuentes happily called ‘the territory of La Mancha’.”
And he has praised the humor and freedom of Cervantes, against the “engolado” image that the most widespread portraits of his face have conveyed. “You can’t see the joy in the eyes, which should reflect, with their brilliance, the writer’s ingenuity,” he noted.
The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, has highlighted the influence of the Spanish exile in Mexico in Celorio’s work, recognized by the author himself, and has thanked the Mexican people for “the great lesson of solidarity and humanity” that he gave to the world by receiving those exiles after the outbreak of the Spanish civil war.
Once the event was over, in the courtyard of the Paraninfo, the writer rested happily with his Cervantes medal around his neck, which he never intends to take off, as he told journalists, trying, now, to reserve his voice for this afternoon’s event, the beginning of the traditional continuous reading of Don Quixote at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid on the occasion of Book Day.
The jury of the prize, endowed with 125,000 euros, has distinguished him as “an integral writer: creator, teacher and passionate reader” and author of a work that is “at the same time a memory of modern Mexico and a mirror of the human condition.” EFE
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