Spanish Hellenist Carlos García Gual wins the Alfonso Reyes 2020 international award

Hellenist Carlos García Gual poses in the library of his home in Madrid in 2019.ANDREA COMAS

The writer Carlos García Gual has won the Alfonso Reyes international award at the age of 77.

The National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature and the Mexican Secretariat of Culture have announced that the unilateral decision of the jury was based on the passion of the Hellenist, who "has left us an extensive and essential bibliography."

Among the author's outstanding titles are

(2016),

(1972) and

(1997).

He is also a translator of great classics, such as

de Homero (2005), has been awarded for his career and literary contribution and joins the list of great authors previously recognized by this award such as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz or Mario Vargas Llosa.

The Mexican Ministry of Culture will deliver the award to the writer in November, if the pandemic allows it.

The emeritus professor of Greek Philology at the Complutense University has been recognized as a writer, philologist, Hellenist, translator, editor, mythographer and literary critic.

He occupies an armchair at the Royal Spanish Academy, has twice received the National Prize in Spain for some of his many translations, and directs the Gredos Classical Library collection.

Gual (Mallorca, 1943) has a special affection for Mexico, for which he feels “a great fascination and an old affection and friendship”, as he has expressed in a statement from the Ministry of Culture.

In an interview with the National Coordination of Literature, the professor stated that it is a great honor to receive this international award, but also something very emotional.

"I have been to Mexico four times and I have excellent memories of all those trips, which include universities, such as Monterrey, Zacatecas, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the International Book Fair of Guadalajara," he said.

Gual assures that he has always felt admiration and cordial sympathy for the works and intellectual figure of Alfonso Reyes as a lively Hellenist and defender of the classics.

Born in the Balearic Islands, he comes from a humble family.

"I read Homer as a child, in my grandfather's library, in Palma de Mallorca, but my decision occurred in my courses at the University of Madrid, where I had excellent Greek teachers," he says.

From a very young age he has written Greek literature, philology, mythology and philosophy;

especially in subjects of the Hellenistic time, on Epicurus, the Cynics and the Greek novels.

However, he emphasizes that it is not the erudition that aroused his interest.

"It was the vitality, the freshness and depth of those ancient texts, which I have always seen so close, so modern and so resonant", he comments.

The Mexican Alfonso Reyes Prize is an international award that recognizes the trajectory, merits and contributions within the literary research of literary writers since 1973 with a diploma and 300,000 pesos.

For this edition, humanists of any nationality who speak another language were invited, including those from the Catalog of National Indigenous Languages.

Candidates had to have a notable career and their literary or research and critical work had to be relevant in the country.