The delivery of the Cervantes Prize is suspended due to the health of Francisco Brines

The poet Francisco Brines, at his home in Oliva (Valencia), in 2019.Mónica Torres

The traditional delivery of the Cervantes Prize in the Auditorium of the University of Alcalá de Henares will not be held this year on the scheduled date, as usual, for April 23, Book Day and the date on which the death of Miguel de Cervantes.

The state of health of the winner, the 89-year-old poet Francisco Brines, which prevents him from traveling from Oliva (Valencia), where he lives, has advised the suspension of the act, sources from the Ministry of Culture and Sports have reported.

Member of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), where he occupies the x chair since April 2001, Brines is part of the generation of 50, also called the "children of war", to which belong, among others, the poets Jaime Gil de Biedma, José Ángel Valente, Claudio Rodríguez, José Agustín Goytisolo and the novelists Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Ana María Matute, Carmen Martín Gaite, Luis Martín Santos and Luis Goytisolo.

From Culture it is unknown, for now, if the event will be held later or how the award will be delivered if it can be carried out.

It is the second time in its history, which began in 1976, that the Cervantes ceremony was suspended.

Last year the situation prevented it due to the state of alarm decreed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Finally, the winner, Joan Margarit, received him in a private ceremony at the hands of Kings Felipe and Letizia, on December 21, 2020.

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Born in 1932 in Oliva, Brines has all the most important awards in Spanish literature, a career crowned with the announcement of Cervantes on November 16, 2020. That day he declared to this newspaper, with humor: “My mother would be very happy because I believed that I was not on the right track ”.

A path that began with his first book,

, published in 1959 and with which he won the Adonais Prize.

Then came

(1966), which earned him the National Critics Award.

In 1987, he received the National Prize for Literature for

which had come out the previous year, consisting of 70 poems written over a decade.

This title became one of his best-known and most popular books, according to the Instituto Cervantes on the page dedicated to this author.

In 1998 he received the Fastenrath Prize, awarded by the RAE, for

of

1995, a melancholic work in which he remembers his childhood and which is his last publication.

The recognitions continued in 1999, with the Nacional de las Letras Españolas for all of his poetic work.

Before the Cervantes, he received in 2010 the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry, which recognizes the literary contribution to the common cultural heritage of Latin America and Spain.

Graduated in Law, Philosophy and Romance Letters and History, Brines has combined poetic production with teaching at the university throughout his life.

In his verses the passing of time, the inevitable decline of the human being, has predominated as a theme.

In 2019 he created a foundation with his name to preserve his literary legacy and, at the same time, give opportunities to new voices of poetry through two annual awards, the Francisco Brines Prize, in Spanish, and the Premi l'Elca, in Catalan.

Elca is the name of her house in Oliva.

Regarding what poetry has meant to him, the day that the Minister of Culture, José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, called him to inform him that he had won the Cervantes, he declared to EL PAÍS: “Poetry has made me say what I never would have said, because my poetry has gone where she wanted, and I, saying yes, letting myself go ”.

That day, the Cervantes jury highlighted that Brines' poetic work "goes from the carnal and the purely human to the metaphysical, the spiritual, towards an aspiration of beauty and immortality."

"He is the intimate poet of the generation of 50 who has delved the most into the experience of the individual human being in the face of memory, the passage of time and vital exaltation."