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The jury qualifies his poetry as “the most Machado of the fifties generation”

francisca aguirre
Photography: MARCOS MIGUEZ

The poet Francisca Aguirre (Alicante, 1930) is the most recent winner of the National Prize for Spanish Literature. The Ministry of Culture is the one who awards a whole work, a whole life dedicated to poetry. Aguirre, who already won the National Poetry Prize in 2011, made poetry a way of perceiving the world and reflecting the lives of an entire generation marked by Spain's recent history.

The jury places it between “desolation and clairvoyance” and between “lucidity and pain”. Some of his books, like Pavana of Restlessness (1999) or the absurd wound (2006), show this inclination to tell the story through poems. Some verses marked by the memory of the dictatorship, of a father who was shot and of his own flight to France at a very young age.

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«My family didn’t have a penny, but they liked music. And then came the gift of speech, which is contact with others and with the material of the poem”, he recalled yesterday. “Without the word, we would be stupid animals, much more so than we are now,” he said. “I like people to like what I write”, acknowledged the author. She remembered “a lot” of her late husband, the poet Félix Grande, but dedicated the award to her daughter Guadalupe, who is alive and well.

This award rewards the dedication and perseverance of those who dedicated their lives to words, to capture in verse their way of looking at the world.

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