Cristina Fernández Cubas, Cervantes Prize 2026

Cristina Fernández Cubas (Barcelona, ​​80 years old) has won the 2026 Cervantes Prize. The jury's decision announced by the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, in Madrid after seven in the afternoon, has highlighted the role that the Barcelona writer has played in "opening paths to new generations of narrators" in "constant dialogue with Latin American works of the literature of strangeness." Fernández Cubas opted for short stories and horror half a century ago, genres that have gained great strength in the work of new generations on both sides of the Atlantic in recent decades. “With an unmistakable voice and a creative freedom that has expanded the expressive possibilities of our literature, his work represents a fundamental contribution,” highlighted the jury.

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.