Joan Margarit wins Cervantes Prize 2019
Catalan poet Joan Margarit has won the 2019 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honour. The announcement was made by the Spanish government on Thursday 14 November 2019. The award, worth €125,000, recognises the lifetime achievement of an outstanding writer. The news comes just months after Margarit was awarded the Reina Sofía prize for Latin American Poetry 2019, the most important poetry award in Spanish and Portuguese.
Margarit (81), who is also an architect, has published 24 volumes of poetry — mainly in Catalan but also in Spanish. He has won several awards for his poetry, including the Premio Nacional de Poesía del Estado Español, Spain’s highest literary award, in 2008. American poet Sharon Olds, who introduced his most recent Bloodaxe title Love Is a Place, calls his work "brilliant...sensually beautiful (but not too beautiful) and with a genuine, just-conceived feeling".
Joan Margarit is Spain's most widely acclaimed contemporary poet. His work has been published in Britain by Bloodaxe Books since 2006, translated from the Catalan by Anna Crowe. His earlier work is gathered together in Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), the first English translation of his Catalan poetry and a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, and Strangely Happy (Bloodaxe Books, 2011). His latest English translation Love Is a Place (2016) includes all the poems from his three most recent Catalan collections.
"If a poem cannot console a person in a difficult situation then it is not worth anything," Margarit told Spanish news agency Europa Press after hearing he had won the Cervantes Prize.
The jury said Margarit "has enriched both the Spanish and the Catalan language and represents the plurality of our culture."
Spanish Minister of Culture and Sport, José Guirao, said that the award was “for his poetic work of deep transcendence and lucid language, always innovative”.
The €125,000 award generally alternates between Spanish and Latin American writers. The prize will be presented to Joan Margarit on 23 April 2020, the anniversary of the death in 1616 of Don Quixote author Miguel de Cervantes, in a ceremony attended by King Felipe VI.
For more on the prize and photos of Joan Margarit taken on the day of the announcement, see here.
Trafika Europe online magazine featured Joan Margarit's essay 'On Life and Poetry' from Love Is a Place, along with four poems from the book.
Joan Margarit talks about his poem 'The eyes in the rear-view mirror' with his translator Anna Crowe, before she reads her English translation and he reads the original poem in Catalan. The poem is from Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems. This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, edited by Neil Astley, which includes three poems from Tugs in the Fog read by Joan Margarit with Anna Crowe.
[19 November 2019]
