the japanese writer Haruki Murakami (Kyoto, 1949) has been awarded this Wednesday in the Spanish city de Oviedo with the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature.
37 candidates from 17 nationalities opted for the award among which were those of the French Pierre Michon, the British Julian Barnes, the Italian Erri de Luca and the Spanish Javier Cercas.
Murakami, also a translator and an eternal candidate for both this award as to the Nobel, resides in the United States and obtained a resounding international success with his work “Tokyo blues” (1987), titled “Norwegian Wood” in its original version and that it was translated into more than forty languages.
Is he first Japanese author to win the Princess of Asturias Award dand Letters in its 43 editions and adds up as well as a list of winners of which they are part, among others, Mario Vargas Llosa, Miguel Delibes, Carlos Fuentes, Günter Grass, Arthur Miller, Doris Lessing, Susan Sontag, Paul Auster, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Leonardo Padura or the playwright Juan Mayorga, who obtained it in 2022.
The award was given to him for “the uniqueness of his literaturea, its universal scope, its ability to reconcile Japanese tradition and the legacy of Western culturel in an ambitious and innovative narrative”, according to the jury.
In the record they acknowledge the author from “Tokyo Blues” their ability to express some of «the great themes and conflicts of our time: loneliness, existential uncertainty, dehumanization in big cities, terrorism, but also care of the body or one’s own reflection on the creative task».
«Her voice, expressed in different genresIt has reached very different generations. Haruki Murakami is a great distance runner in literature contemporary“, emphasizes the jury, which was chaired by the director of the Royal Spanish Academy, Santiago Muñoz Machado.
Become a cult author and translated into more than forty languages, the candidacy by Murakami was proposed by María Sheila Cremaschi, director for Spain of the Hay Festival of Literature and Artsentity awarded with the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities in 2020.
Son of literature professors, Murakami graduated in Literature, Music and Performance from Waseda University from his hometown In 1975. He is passionate American literature and Anglo-Saxon musicran a local for years of jazz in Tokio, while translating authors such as Truman Capote, Scott Fitzgerald, JD Salinger or John Irving.
His first book was “Hear the wind sing/Hear the wind sing” (1979)which was followed “Pinball, 1973” (1980), but he became known with his novel “The hunt for the wild ram” (1982) and in 1985 came “The end of the world and the end of wonders.”
Influenced by writers like Fedor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens or the aforementioned Truman Capote, Murakami He later wrote novels like “Dance, Dance, Dance” (1988); “South of the border, west of the sun” (1992); «Bird Chronicle that winds up the world” (1994); “Underground” (1997); “Sputnik, my love” (1999); “Kafka on the shore” (2002) and “After dark” (2004).
His synthetic and cinematographic prose in which he plays with fiction and reality captivated millions of readers with a work in which the trilogy «1Q84» (2009-10), three volumes whose title pays homage to «1984» by George Orwell In addition to books of stories such as «The elephant vanishes» (1993) and “After the earthquake” (2000), that places the plot in the earthquake that devastated Kobe in 1995 and the essays “What am I talking about when I talk about running» (2007) and “What do I talk about when I talk about writing» (2015).
Murakami, that in 2023 published his latest novel«The City and its Uncertain Walls», is in possession of awards such as the Frank Kafka (2006), the jerusalem award (2009), the Noma, the Tanizaki and the Yomiuri in Japan and in Espana was distinguished with the Order of Arts and Letters 2009 or the International Prize of Catalonia 2011.
The Prize for Literature was the fifth of the eight Princess of Asturias Awards to fail this year, all of them endowed with the reproduction of a sculpture designed by Joan Miró, 50,000 euros in cash, a diploma and a badge and that they will be delivered next October during a ceremony at the Teatro Campoamor in Oviedo.