The injury time has started. After a year of work, on October 20 the Princess of Asturias Foundation will present its awards. A solemn and decisive ceremony this year, as it will take place eleven days before the Princess of Asturias comes of age. And this year the awards ceremony will have a great international projection, not only because of the presence of the Heiress and the Kings, Don Felipe and Doña Letizia, but because the Foundation has managed to bring together Haruki Murakami and Meryl Streep in Oviedo .
The Japanese writer, author of best sellers as Tokio Blues and awarded in the Literature category, will an exception to his principle of discretion and not to waste himself with a trip to Oviedo. In fact, the author, whose candidacy was proposed by Maria Sheila Cremaschi, director of the Hay Festival, will participate in some activity during Awards week. There she will meet the actress Meryl Streep, winner in the Arts category and who is looking forward to arriving in Oviedo to experience the Awards week. Three-time Oscar winner, she is going to honor the interpreter of Mamma Mia! with the screening of this film in Porrúa, an Asturian town that was distinguished as the Exemplary Town in 2005, when the Princess of Asturias was born, so this event has been conceived as a tribute to the Heiress prior to her 18th birthday. The interpreter, who will come to Spain accompanied by a family member, could coincide at the awards with Pedro Almodóvar, who promoted her candidacy.
The presence of these two international winners confirms once again the prestige of being awarded a Princess of Asturias. The award is endowed with a financial prize of 50.000 euros, in addition to the insignia, the diploma and a sculpture of Joan Miró An award that is not very high compared to other awards, because prestige is chosen over a financial award. A few years ago, the Foundation changed its rules so that those winners who did not attend the ceremony would not receive the financial award, as happened to Bob Dylan, awarded in 2007 in the Arts category.
If this international presence will be the great attraction of the ceremony, on the other hand there is the absence of two winners, who have died after being chosen winners. It is the first edition in which two winners die before collecting the prize. The French historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse She died on August 5 at the age of 94. In May she had been chosen in the Social Sciences category because her work “probably constitutes the most substantive contribution that has been made in recent decades to the knowledge of the Soviet Union and Russia,” he said. the judge.
The philosopher Nuccio Ordine, author of, among others, The usefulness of the useless, a manifesto in which he defended the need to know about the social sciences, won the Communication and Humanities award for establishing “a dialogue with contemporary society to convey, especially to the youngest, that the importance of knowledge is found in the learning process itself. He died last June at the age of 64. In both cases, family members will collect the prizes from him.