Anne Carson wins Princess of Asturias award

In the middle of an atypical and solemn ceremony, the poet, essayist, novelist, academic, and translator won the Joan Miró sculpture, a representative symbol of the award, but this time she was not present at the ceremony.

The moment will remain in the historical memory of the world of letters, for the first time the XL delivery of the Princess of Asturias award, had as its backdrop seventeen simultaneous screens in which the juries who listened attentively to the reading of the minutes in which they were present highlighted the writer's work but she never appeared. The delivery was symbolic.

Once the broadcast of only ten minutes ended, the world's media were in charge of highlighting the value of the award to the Canadian writer, who, as the Spanish poet and critic Diego Doncel explains,  is the poetic voice of a woman able to seduce readers from all over the world and "reach in a very profound way the poetry in Spanish of America and Spain".

"Her work maintains a commitment to emotion and thought, with the study of tradition and the renewed presence of the Humanities as a way to achieve a better awareness of our time," said Santiago Muñoz Machado, President of the Jury and academic, director of the Spanish Royal Academy.

In the different areas of her writing, Anne Carson has reached levels of intensity and intellectual solvency that place her among the most outstanding writers of the present. For her it is simpler than that, she does not like to talk about herself, humble, grim and elusive, she prefers to emphasize that she writes in three desks distributed in different corners of her house and that her poetry “always has a foundation that looks out on the reality to rescue the stories that are truly memorable. "

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Carson is, in the opinion of the critic, one of the most exquisite and erudite writers of contemporary literature, as well as the author of a hypnotic work, in which she fuses styles, references, formats, and is committed to the hybrid between the Greco-Latin, the medieval and contemporary, a complex and different mix, that's why it is successful.

For her, translation and creation are synonymous terms. She stated: “If I knew what poetry is, I would have no need to write. It's something I fumble for in the dark. " Thus she has created an exquisite world, a collage between poetry, dissertation, essay, and drama, with contributions sometimes even from opera.

She does not like to talk about herself nor of the total number of publications that only in books add up to more than 20 since the first one written in 1986, at that time she was 42 years old. Her character as a humble intellectual who refuses to talk about her successes because she prefers to leave the research to others and only say that: "it is not necessary to explain how many books I have written, for me, more is less", she stated in an interview of the International Book Fair in Buenos Aires in 2018.

A correct and accurate description is what Diego Doncel wrote about her on ABC Spain, explaining that "her poems, her literature, have so much knowledge, inquiry, and criticism. They mix high and colloquial language, reflection, and the most everyday sensation. But above all, they are sober and portray the enormous precariousness in which their characters live ”.