Cristina Peri Rossi receives the Cervantes Prize: "While some are fanatically dedicated to becoming rich, others are dedicated to emotions"

• Cervantes Peri Rossi Prize, poet of desire and rebellion

So great is

that there is a corner of the novel in which each reader can recognize himself.

Cristina Peri Rossi, the Uruguayan writer who received the Cervante Prize this morning in Alcalá de Henares, recalled Marcela, an almost forgotten character who appears in chapter XII of the novel, in her acceptance speech: "

, to which she refused, and in a surprising speech she rejects men, marriage and power relations between the sexes: she demands her freedom and for that she isolates herself from society and takes refuge in the countryside, like one more shepherdess ", he explained in his speech. Marcela, at the end of the pages, would be seen as "neurotic and frigid". A valuable lesson in the author's life.

The words of Peri Rossi have sounded in Alcalá from the mouth of the Argentine actress

.

The Kings Don Felipe and Doña Letizia;

the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez;

The Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, and the President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, among other authorities, attended the ceremony, the first to be held in the Alcalá Paraninfo after two years of the pandemic.

Miquel Iceta has had to give the

of Peri Rossi, the sixth woman in the Cervantes award winners.

The minister narrated the life of the writer from her childhood in a modest middle class in Montevideo and her simultaneous discovery of literature and the loneliness of women.

"[Peri Rossi's] rebelliousness is born

," explained Iceta, who also quoted some lines by Peri Rossi taken from her memoirs,

"Learn the lesson: women do not write and when they write, they commit suicide".

"

. Literature opens a key space to understand life and live it; to stop the moment and its beauty", continued Iceta.

Peri Rossi's speech delivered by Cecilia Roth seemed well aligned with this idea and dealt, above all, with

.

"I had to exile myself from the Uruguayan dictatorship because, as Casandra had warned and denounced her arrival and, as punishment, my books and even the mention of my name were prohibited.

. I turned resistance into literature. [...] I have tried, like Dona Quixota, to undo wrongs".

Cecilia Roth.EFE

"While some are fanatically dedicated to getting rich and dominating the sources of power, others are dedicated to expressing the emotions and fantasies, dreams and desires of human beings."

In her speech, Peri Rossi also dealt with Europe, at war when she was born, in 1941 and at war today, with humor, with

to her readers, a mixture of distancing and love of paradox.

"Humor is the sixth sense of literature. [...] I wrote this short poem:

. I could write the most grateful lines tonight and I'd do my duty. "

as a scribe, although the verses would not save those who die by bombs and missiles in cultured Europe".

After that acceptance speech, King Don Felipe made the last praise of the new Cervantes award and an explanation of his work.

"Cristina Peri Rossi makes use of the allegorical and the symbolic, of modernized myths, where they meet -comments the author- '

', defending the idea that literature has the purpose of expressing itself

, transmit and commit".

Don Felipe ended by expressing his "hope that the readers of his works will multiply in Uruguay, in Spain and throughout the American continent."

.

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