Oviedo, May 24 (EFE).- The jury of the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature will announce this noon in Oviedo the winner of this edition, to which 37 nominations from 17 nationalities are presented.
The twenty members of the jury began their deliberations yesterday to decide which writer will be awarded in a meeting chaired by the director of the Royal Spanish Academy, Santiago Muñoz Machado, who revealed that “there are three or four extraordinary oriental candidates, among the best in the world at the moment”.
Among these writers, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami stands out, a candidate who has been raised on numerous occasions but, according to the Mexican writer Juan Villoro “has been punished a bit for being too popular.”
This Mexican journalist and writer has also opted for the Romanian writer Ana Blandiana, “a moving poet, Nobel Prize level, and defender of civil rights.”
For his part, Leonado Padura, a Cuban writer, journalist and screenwriter, who in 2015 won this award, pointed out that, after being awarded to writers of the Gallic, English and Spanish language, this year there is the possibility that there will be a “surprise from another language”.
In the corridors of the Hotel de la Reconquista, where the deliberations are taking place, the names of French writer Pierre Michon, French Academy Novel Prize winner, and British novelist Julian Patrick Barnes, winner of the 2011 Booker Prize, also sounded yesterday. and the writer from Extremadura Javier Cercas, Planeta Award in 2019.
Likewise, the British playwright of Czech origin Tom Stoppard, famous for works such as “The Coast of Utopia” or the script for the film “Shakespeare in Love”, and the Italian novelist Erri de Luca, a translator of several languages who learned in a self-taught way, among which the translation of several passages of the Bible written in ancient Hebrew stands out.
In addition to Juan Mayorga (2022), a member of this jury, in past editions Antonio Muñoz Molina (2013), the American novelist Philip Roth (2012) and the Canadian poet and singer Leonard Cohen (2011) have been honored, among others. .