The poet Joan Margarit (Sanaüja, 1938) has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize for 2017, a major Ibero-American literary prize that has been awarded every year since 2004 by the Chilean National Council of Culture and the Arts. The award’s panel of judges, meeting in La Sebastiana, Neruda’s house in Valparaíso, has acknowledged “the quality of his poetry and the lyrical power of the Catalan language”, as well as the ability to combine “formal beauty and emotion”, his dialogue “with memory and the ethical dimension of the commitment to life and death”. Among other prizes, in Catalonia Margarit has received the Carles Riba Prize (1985); the Serra d’Or Critics’ Prize (1982, 1987 and 2007); the Generalitat de Catalunya’s National Prize for Literature (2008), and the Jaume Fuster Prize. In Spain he was awarded the Spanish Critics’ Prize in 1984 and 2008, and the Ministry of Culture’s Prize for Poetry in 2008.

The prize is awarded to an author with an acknowledged career and whose work contributes to the cultural and artistic dialogue of Latin America. The prize is worth $60,000, plus a medal and a diploma. The panel of judges comprises the writers Piedad Bonnet (Colombia), Luisa Futoransky (Argentina), Luis García Montero (Spain), Rubí Carreño (Chile) and Raúl Zurita (Chile).

The prize has previously been won by José Emilio Pacheco (Mexico); Juan Gelman (Argentina); Carlos Germán Belli (Peru); Fina García-Marruz (Cuba); Carmen Berenguer (Chile); Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua); Antonio Cisneros (Peru); Óscar Hahn (Chile); Nicanor Parra (Chile); José Kozer (Cuba); Reina María Rodríguez (Cuba); Augusto de Campos (Brazil), and Raúl Zurita (Chile).