Spanish Women Writers in the News
Image of Puertolas from her official webpage
It’s been a good week for Spanish women writers of a certain generation (or two)! First of all, last Sunday the novelist Soledad Puértolas was inducted into the Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy), only the 5th woman member out of a current total of 46. I have to confess I haven’t read any of her novels, so I guess she’ll be making her way onto my teetering tower of books before too long … Here’s a brief roundup of reports on the event:
BBC Mundo (Spanish) / La Vanguardia (Spanish) / El Pais (general report, in Spanish) / El Pais (women in the RAE, in Spanish) / TVE report (sound! in Spanish)
Image of Matute from her official webpage
As if this wasn’t exciting enough, on Wednesday, the last woman to be inducted into the RAE before Puértolas (12 years ago!), Ana Maria Matute (official homepage), was awarded the Premio Cervantes, which is Spain’s literary lifetime achievement award. Matute, a Catalan-born novelist writing in Spanish, is only the third female writers to be awarded the prize since its inception in 1976, after Spain’s Maria Zambrano (1988) and Cuba’s Dulce Maria Loynaz (1992). Zambrano only survived 3 years after getting the prize and Loynaz 5 years, so here’s hoping Matute bucks that trend! And here’s a brief roundup of reports – interestingly, we in the English-speaking world seem to have been far more interested in the Cervantes Prize than the Real Academia!:
BBC Mundo (in Spanish) / El Pais (Spanish) / BBC (English) / New York Times (English) / The Independent (English) / TVE report (sound! in Spanish) / TVE bio (sound! in Spanish)
