The Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi, winner of the 2021 Cervantes Prize

The jury of the ‘Miguel de Cervantes’ Prize for Literature in the Spanish Language for 2021 has chosen the Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi as the winner of this year’s edition. The award is endowed with 125,000 euros and constitutes the most prestigious award for letters in Spanish.

Cervantes, considered the Nobel Prize for Castilian letters, awarded last year the poet Francisco Brines, who died in May 2021. With last year’s award, the traditional alternation was broken of the award – which this year has been fulfilled.

Although there is an unwritten rule by which the Cervantes Prize goes to a Spanish author every two years, in the edition of three years ago it was also broken, since a Latin American author -Ida Vitale- was awarded after the 2017 prize for Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez. On this last occasion, a similar event occurred, with two Spanish writers awarded consecutively.

The record of recent years is completed with the names of Joan Margarit (2019), Ida Vitale (2018), Sergio Ramírez (2017), Eduardo Mendoza (2016), Fernando del Paso (2015), Juan Goytisolo (2014), Elena Poniatowska (2013), José Manuel Caballero Bonald (2012) and Nicanor Parra (2011), among others.

In 1976, Jorge Guillén, one of the greatest figures of the Generation of 27, received the first of these awards and, since then, 41 other winners have succeeded: 20 Spaniards and another 21 Hispanic Americans. Only in 1979 were there two winners, when Gerardo Diego and Jorge Luis Borges were awarded ex aequo.

So far, only six women have been awarded the Cervantes in its 41-year history, counting on the current winner: the Spanish María Zambrano (1988) and Ana María Matute (2010), the Cuban Dulce María Loynaz (1992), the Mexican Elena Poniatowska (2013) and the Uruguayan Ida Vitale (2018).