Cristina Fernández Cubas, Cervantes Prize 2026, live

Cristina Fernández Cubas (Barcelona, ​​80 years old) has won the 2026 Cervantes Prize. Opening paths for new generations of narrators, Fernández Cubas maintains a constant dialogue with Latin American works of literature of strangeness. With an unmistakable voice and a creative freedom that has expanded the expressive possibilities of our literature, her work represents a fundamental contribution that establishes Cristina Fernández de Cubas as one of the most important figures of literature in Spanish.

A book with four stories by an unknown author did not seem like a very promising debut in Spain at the end of the seventies of the last century. The Latin American boom and its great novels set a trend as a great commercial phenomenon, and the story, often understood as a testing ground, was valued among writers and teachers, but not among the general public. "It was a demonized genre. There was a confusion that denied the quality of the story, as if it were a failed chapter of a novel. They told me that the stories were good but that it was strange and that those books sold poorly," Cristina Fernández Cubas recalled.