Storytellers and poets to star in Cervantes Week with activities in Spain and Mexico
Starting next week, from 19 to 27 April, the Cervantes Institute will celebrate Cervantes Week 2022, a programme of cultural activities that will include tributes to great writers with the "in memoriam" bequests of José García Nieto, José Saramago, Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León; and with the legacy that the poet Carmen Castellote will deliver to García Montero in Mexico. The inauguration of an exhibition dedicated to the Adonáis Awards, a poetic dialogue celebrating the work of the Cervantes Prize-winning women authors and a lecture by Ian Gibson on Lorca complete the agenda in Spain.
This year, in addition to the events at the Cervantes venues in Madrid and Alcalá de Henares, the programme will reach the other side of the Atlantic with an agenda of activities in Mexico, where the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, will be travelling, not to mention the more than 40 activities held in the network of Cervantes centres and libraries around the world.
The programme will begin on Tuesday 19 April (11 a.m.) with the legacy "in memoriam" of the writer José García Nieto (Oviedo, 1914 - Madrid, 2001), winner of the Cervantes Prize in 1996 and one of the most renowned figures in Spanish post-war literature. The director of the Cervantes Museum, Luis García Montero, and the Regional Minister of Culture, Tourism and Sport of the Community of Madrid, Marta Rivera de la Cruz, will accompany Paloma García-Nieto, daughter of the honoree and president of the García Nieto Foundation, who will deposit the bequest.
On Wednesday, 20 April, the Cervantes Centre in Alcalá de Henares will inaugurate the exhibition "75th Anniversary of the Adonáis Awards" (19:00), a bibliographical retrospective, open until 17 July, which commemorates the years of the longest-running poetry award in Spain. In attendance will be García Montero, director of Cervantes and winner of the Adonáis Prize in 1985, Santiago Herráiz, managing director of Ediciones Rialp, and Carmelo Guillén Acosta, director of the Adonáis Collection and curator of the exhibition.
Once again at the Madrid headquarters, on Thursday 21 April, "El fuego apartado" (11:30 am), a dramatised reading will bring the works of the six winners of the Cervantes Prize to the public: María Zambrano, Dulce María Loynaz, Ana María Matute, Elena Poniatowska, Ida Vitale and Cristina Peri Rossi.
Cervantes Week will extend its reach to the other side of the Atlantic with activities in Mexico, a country to be visited by the director of the Cervantes Institute. On 23 April, International Book Day, the legacy of the poet Carmen Castellote, the last survivor of the Republican exile, will be celebrated.
García Montero's programme in Mexico will begin the day before, on Friday 22 April, with the conference "Saving poetry, saving the world" at the Los Pinos cultural complex in Mexico City. He will also take part in the celebration of the "Fiesta del Libro y la Rosa" at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in activities alongside Benito Taibo and Rosa Beltrán, on 23 and 24 April.
Legacies of José Saramago and Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León
On Monday 25 April, a significant date for the Portuguese people, as it commemorates the Carnation Revolution, the Caja de las Letras will receive (19:00) a legacy in memoriam from the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago (1922-2010) on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. The Director of the Cervantes Institute will accompany the President of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, and the President of the José Saramago Foundation, Pilar del Río, who will deposit the legacy.
In the morning, on the same Monday, and in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes in Tokyo, the Irish-born hispanist and historian Ian Gibson will give a lecture entitled "Federico García Lorca and the gay world" (11:30 am) on the implications of the Granada-born poet's homosexuality in his time and work.
The programme of this great week of literature will close on Wednesday 27 April with the joint legacy in memoriam that pays tribute to the writers Rafael Alberti (1902-1999) and María Teresa León (1903-1988), both members of the Generation of '27. Teresa Alberti, Rafael Alberti's niece, will deposit the legacy, accompanied by García Montero and Fernando Martínez López, Secretary of State for Democratic Memory.
The Cervantes Institute's centres, almost 90 spread across the five continents, will join in this programme with various activities such as workshops, presentations, lectures and readings. Among the invited guests are writers Andrés Trapiello, Leonardo Padura, Alfonso Mateo-Sagasta, Fernando Savater; poets Talal Haidar, Juan Vicente Piqueras Salinas and Alejandra Szir; and cartoonist José María Gallego López, among many others.
Submitted by José Antonio Sierra, Hispanismo advisor.
