The Catalan Joan Manuel Serrat has been awarded this year with the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts. The jury announced the winner this Wednesday, recognizing the long career of the famous singer-songwriter born in Barcelona, ??who at the end of 2022 put an end to his life on stage. “In Serrat the art of poetry and music come together at the service of tolerance and shared values,” the jury assessed when making their verdict public from Oviedo.
The noi of Poble-sec has been chosen at 80 years old from among the fifty candidates of twenty-one nationalities, a candidacy that he had already experienced in the past; the last in 2018. In this way, Serrat takes over from Meryl Streep, winner of the previous edition.
The Princess of Asturias Awards ceremony will be held, as usual, in the month of October in a solemn ceremony presided over by the king and queen at the Campoamor Theater in the Asturian capital, accompanied by Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofía.
Serrat made his debut in a concert with Els Setge Jutges in 1965. That was just the starting signal for a brilliant career that has earned him recognition not only in Catalonia and Spain, but also worldwide.
The Arts Award, the first of the eight awards that the Princess of Asturias Foundation announces each year to fail, is intended to distinguish “the work of creation, cultivation and improvement of architecture, cinematography, dance, sculpture, photography, music, painting, theater and other artistic manifestations”.
Figures such as the filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Michael Haneke and Pedro Almodóvar, the musicians Paco de Lucía, Bob Dylan and Joaquín Rodrigo, the architects Norman Foster, Frank Gehry and Rafael Moneo, have also received this award. or, more recently, the singer Carmen Linares, the dancer María Pagés and the performance artist Marina Abramovi?.
After the Arts award granted to the author of emblematic songs such as Mediterráneo, Paraules d’amor, Today can be a great day, Those crazy shorts or Those little things, the Communication and Humanities awards will be announced in the coming weeks, on the 30th of April; Sports, May 8; Social Sciences, May 15; Letters, on the 23rd of the same month; International Cooperation, 29; Scientific and Technical Research, on June 5, and finally Concordia, on June 12.
The Princess of Asturias Awards, which reach their forty-fourth edition and for which this year 321 candidates from 55 nationalities have been submitted, are intended to distinguish those people or institutions that contribute with their work and their merits in the scientific, technical and , cultural, social and humanitarian to progress and social well-being in an extraordinary and exemplary way.
Last year’s winners were Meryl Streep (Arts), Nuccio Ordine (Communication and Humanities), Hélène Carrère d’Encausse (Social Sciences), Eliud Kipchoge (Sports), Haruki Murakami (Letters), Medicines for Neglected Diseases Initiative (International Cooperation ), Jeffrey Gordon, E. Peter Greenberg and Bonnie L. Bassler (Scientific and Technical Research) and Mary”s Meals (Concordia).
Each Princess of Asturias Award is endowed with a reproduction of a sculpture by Joan Miró – the representative symbol of the award -, an accrediting diploma, a badge and the cash amount of fifty thousand euros.
