Oviedo, May 10 (EFE).- The awarding of the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences to the French historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse two years after the Prize for Letters went to her son Emmanuel makes both of them the first mother and son who receive that distinction throughout the 43-year history of the awards.
If Hélène Carrère has been awarded for her contribution to the knowledge of the extinct Soviet Union and Russia, “one of the essential issues for understanding the contemporary world”, her son was distinguished in 2021 “for a highly personal work that generates a new space of expression that erases the borders between reality and fiction”.
However, this is not the first time that two members of the same family have won one of the eight prizes awarded annually by the Princess of Asturias Foundation, which, throughout its history, has awarded them up to four times to the two members of a couple.
The first precedent was set by the late South African president and leader in the fight against apartheid, Nelson Mandela, who obtained in 1992 the then still called Prince of Asturias Award in the International Cooperation category.
Six years later, the same award went to seven women who wanted to symbolize the fight for real equality throughout the world, a group that included the Mozambican Graça Machel, who that same year became Mandela’s third wife. .
Mandela died in 2013, the year in which the photographer Annie Leibovitz was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, a decade after the Literature award went to her partner, the writer Susan Sontag, who died in 2004. .
Nine years earlier, in 2006, the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, and his then wife, Melinda, received the International Cooperation award for the work of the Foundation to which they gave their name, dedicated to the eradication of diseases such as malaria and AIDS on the African continent.
In 2019, the American writer, essayist and poet Siri Hustvedt saw her “concern for the fundamental questions of contemporary ethics” recognized from “very courageous positions” with the Literature Prize, which she went to collect accompanied by her husband, Paul Auster, that he had already received it in 2006 “for uniting the best of North American and European traditions.”
But the relationships between winners do not end there. The basketball players Pau and Marc Gasol, already distinguished in 2006 with the Sports Award as members of the Spanish team that won the world championship that year, received it jointly again in 2015 for their successful career in the NBA and their exemplary social work. although on that occasion they could not go to Oviedo to receive it.