Raúl Zurita awarded the Reina Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry

The renowned Chilean artist Raúl Zurita (Santiago de Chile, 1950) is the winner of the Ibero-American Poetry Award, one of the most important Spanish-speaking poetry awards. The award is endowed with 42,100 euros and was granted by the Patrimonio Nacional de España and the Universidad de Salamanca. Zurita is the third Chilean poet to receive this award; before it was awarded to Gonzalo Rojas and Nicanor Parra.
"The award recognizes his work, his poetic example of overcoming pain, with verses with words committed to life, freedom, and nature," said Llanos Castellano, president of the Patrimonio Nacional.
Raúl Zurita has received other significant awards, such as the National Prize for Literature in 2000, the José Lezama Lima Poetry Prize, Casa de las Américas 2006, and the Pablo Neruda Award for Ibero-American Poetry, in 1988. Despite the satisfaction of the award, because of the difficult moments due to the pandemic and the social situation in Chile, the writer expressed: "The award is a joy, but the situation is so hard, there are so many people having a hard time that one cannot be fully happy. You cannot subtract yourself from this pandemic or from the enormous injustices that are looming in a terrifying way. A country is not measured by those who are good but by how bad those who are bad are."
Among his important works are Purgatorio (1979), Anteparaíso (1982), and Literatura, Lenguaje y Sociedad (1983).