The 2025 Cervantes Prize goes to the Mexican Gonzalo Celorio

BarcelonaThe Mexican novelist, essayist, editor, and literary critic Gonzalo Celorio (Mexico City, 1948) has been proclaimed the winner of the 2025 Cervantes Prize. Celorio, who is currently the director of the Mexican Academy of Language—and who, from 2000 to 2002, directed the Ministry of Culture—was awarded the prize in 1990 with the essay The muted era (Lime and Sand), and shortly afterwards published his first novel, Self-love (Tusquets, 1992), in which he narrates the protagonist's return to Mexico City, where he must confront his past and the city's decay.

Memory, personal identity, and the relationship between the individual and their environment are three of the recurring themes in Celorio's work, which has also explored the author's relationship with his brother, as he did in Metal and slag (Tusquets, 2014), and it calls for the betrayal of youthful ideals that can be a reality in adult life, as argued in The apostates (Tusquets, 2020). In an edition where names like Piedad Bonnett, Gioconda Belli, César Aira, and Margo Glantz were mentioned as possible winners, the jury awarded the prize to Celorio "for his exceptional literary work, profound and grounded in Hispanic culture" and because "he combines critical exploration with insight." Celorio will receive the Cervantes Prize on April 23 at a ceremony to be held in the auditorium of the University of Alcalá de Henares. The Cervantes Prize, worth 125,000 euros, is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the Spanish language and recognizes the career of an author who, "through their body of work, has contributed to enriching the Hispanic literary legacy." Since 1976, authors such as Rafael Alberti, María Zambrano, Miguel Delibes, Antonio Gamoneda, Ana María Matute and Eduardo MendozaIn 2019, the Cervantes Prize was awarded to one of the only authors who has written his work in both Catalan and Spanish. Joan MargaritIn the last three editions, the winners of the Cervantes Prize were Rafael Cadenas (2022), Luis Mateo Díez (2023) and Álvaro Pombo (2024).