In the crowded corridors of the Guadalajara International Book FairWhere it's difficult to make your way through readers and onlookers, there's a point where the crowd parts with special respect: the small corridor that's improvised to let people pass. Gonzalo Celorio, recent winner of the Cervantes PrizeHe travels around the venue in a wheelchair, greeting everyone with a smile. His compatriots stop him, congratulate him, and thank him for bringing the most important award in Spanish literature to Mexico.
The Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) has welcomed him this year as a true figure of reference: in addition to the Cervantes Prize, Celorio heads one of the most symbolic tributes of the meeting, the one dedicated to the bibliophile José Luis MartÃnez, an award that highlights his passion for books and a personal library that has become almost mythical among readers and colleagues.
A Cervantes who arrives after a lifetime among books
The writer confesses that, when the phone rang with the news of the Cervantes Prize, he had been on tenterhooks for hours: The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) had submitted its candidacy And he felt, as he humorously puts it, that he had "a lottery ticket," even though he didn't know if he would win. The surprise, he says, was enormous, especially when he saw himself on the same list as Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, José Emilio Pacheco, Sergio Pitol, and Elena Poniatowska.
Far from being relaxed by the recognition, Celorio says he feels with an almost rejuvenated energyThe award coincided with the appearance of his memoir, That pile of broken mirrors (Tusquets), a volume compiled from texts written over decades and now arranged chronologically and thematically. He didn't conceive of it as a conventional memoir, but rather as a kind of self-editing.
In those pages he reviews her family origins, her love and literary passions, her public and private life, and her dedication to teachingBut he leaves his children out. He explains this with a metaphor that sums up his approach well: the "broken mirrors" of the title are the fragments of his life that have demanded critical reflection; his children, on the other hand, belong to the most solid and least broken part of his existence.
The bibliophile honored at the Guadalajara International Book Fair
Alongside the international acclaim for the Cervantes Prize, the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) is paying tribute to it this year. Tribute to the Bibliophile José Luis MartÃnezOne of the most prestigious awards of the event. The ceremony is being held in the Juan Rulfo Auditorium, with the participation of the Rector of the University of Guadalajara, Karla Alejandrina Planter; the President of the Book Fair, José Trinidad Padilla; the Vice-Rector, Jaime F. Andrade; the Director of the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), Marisol Schulz; and the Director of the University Library System, Sergio López.
The biographical sketch of Celorio is written by the poet Fernando Fernández, while the institutional closing remarks are delivered by the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis GarcÃa Montero, who is traveling to Guadalajara to join in the recognition of one of the most solid names in current Hispanic literature.
This tribute highlights a facet that the writer himself frequently emphasizes: his almost obsessive passion for books. He recounts that With the first salary he ever earned, he bought a Spanish grammar manualand that this gesture marked the beginning of a lifelong relationship with libraries and the study of language.
As a child, one of his older brothers introduced him to the world of words, inviting him to his library and teaching him terms he didn't fully understand but which he repeated with fascination. Those "prestigious" words gave him his own identity within a large family and became the seed of a search for oneself through languageSomething that, he says, has guided practically his entire career.
The FIL (Guadalajara International Book Fair) has also continued to fascinate him. Celorio recalls with irony his participation in the first edition in 1987, when the event was, in his own words, "a kind of..." book market"with specimens piled high and prices marked as if they were kilos of tomatoes. Since then, he has seen the event grow into an international fair that combines the professional aspect with a festive side that is hard to find in Europe."
Literature as exorcism and space of conflict
In the press conferences held in Guadalajara, the Cervantes Prize winner emphasized an idea that sums up his conception of the craft: "one writes, to a large extent, to forget"For him, literature is a mechanism of exorcism that allows one to distance oneself from the conflicts that everyday life fails to resolve in a simple after-dinner conversation."
Novels, he explains, are almost always born from a conflict that forces the writer to navigate through many pagesThat problem doesn't disappear entirely, but it is transfigured, attenuated, exorcised by writing. That's why, when he publishes a book, he feels he has let go of it and that the process that truly matters to him has already taken place.
From that perspective, Celorio speaks of the reader with a mixture of humor and lucidity: he describes him as "a kind of masochistic "We read," he argues, "because by learning about the problems of others we recognize ourselves in them, we feel part of the same human race, and we learn to understand ourselves a little better."
His view of writing is very much about inquiry. He states that the author He knows when he sets sail, but he has no idea where he's going to end up.And that this journey of uncertainty is an essential part of the literary work. The text opens paths that the writer himself discovers as he progresses.
When questioned about the potential impact of artificial intelligence on literary creation, Celorio is cautious but clear: he admits that these tools can produce ingenious formulations or supporting texts, but He does not believe they can replace the intimate and conflicted experience of writing. as he understands it, nor the living relationship between a flesh-and-blood author and his readers.
Spanish language, Mexican identity and relationship with Spain
In the context of the Cervantes Prize and his presence at the FIL (Guadalajara International Book Fair), Celorio also reflected on the role of Spanish in his country's history. In a conversation with the EFE news agency, he emphasized that «without the Spanish language "Mexico would not exist," since it was, in his opinion, the language of independence and the tool with which the nation's political and cultural project was articulated.
From that perspective, he views with skepticism contemporary debates demanding an apology from Spain for the conquest. He believes that These proposals create an unnecessary and pointless polarizationbecause they simplify a complex and shared history in which language has been simultaneously heritage, conflict, and a space for creation.
His career also places him in a position of ongoing dialogue between Mexico, Spain, and the rest of the Hispanic world. Director of the Mexican Academy of Language since 2019, an institution of which he has been a part for more than thirty years, and a corresponding academic of the Royal Spanish Academy and the Cuban Academy of Language, which reinforces that link with Europe and, in particular, with the pan-Hispanic system.
In his literary work, Celorio has frequently addressed the history and transformation of Mexico City. He observes with concern that the capital He says he is walking towards his own destruction.This reflects a broader self-destructive attitude in Mexican society. Faced with this situation, he champions writing as a way to preserve on the page what is still worth preserving.
For the author, only literature can symbolically alleviate that destruction: Writing about Mexico allows him to capture in words the ways of life, the landscapes, and the contradictions. of a city in constant change, even though it is aware that what remains over time becomes increasingly fragmented.
Teaching, Spanish exile, and a body of work that crosses genres
Much of Gonzalo Celorio's life has been spent in the classroom. A university professor for decades, he was at the head of the Chair of Masters of the Spanish Exile at UNAMwhere he explored the mark left in Mexico by the Republican intellectuals who arrived after the Civil War.
He remembers with special affection teachers like Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, who arrived in Veracruz on the ship Sinaia, or the poet Luis Rius, whom they took with them to America. the spirit of the Republican exile and a demanding idea of ​​cultureIn his opinion, that legacy was one of their great collective teachers and consolidated a lasting intellectual bridge between Mexico and Spain.
Celorio often jokes that that subject could have been called "the lecture hall of my hoarse chest"Because it allowed him to talk about what interested him most at any given time. At the beginning of each semester, he would ask himself what he wanted to learn, and from there he would build a course in which, he maintains, both the students and he learned.
That teaching experience fuels a conviction that he often repeats: «the best way to learn "It's about teaching." Preparing lessons, engaging in dialogue with students, and the need to clearly explain complex terms have, he confesses, helped him organize his own literary and critical thinking.
His creative work spans novels, essays, and reflections on language. Among his best-known titles are the novels self-esteem, The earth trembles in its core y The apostatesas well as essays such as From the splendor of the Spanish language, Lies of memory o The sedentary journeyWith them, it has established itself as one of the most influential voices in Mexican literary thought.
Throughout his career he has received awards such as the National Prize for Sciences and ArtsThe Mazatlán Literature Prize or the José Vasconcelos Medal, distinctions that, together with the Cervantes Prize, recognize both his work and his role in the cultural life of Mexico and the Hispanic world.
In his appearances in Guadalajara, Celorio mentioned that, as the years go by, The past lengthens and the future shortensThis awareness of time has led him to write more about his experiences, to organize memories and transform them into texts that function not only as a personal memoir, but also as a map of the passions and conflicts of his generation.
At this moment of creative maturity, amidst tributes, interviews, and accolades, the Cervantes Prize appears in Gonzalo Celorio's career as a public confirmation of something many readers already perceived: His figure articulates language, memory, and critical reflection on Mexico and the Hispanic world, and his literature has become one of the places from which that shared framework between America and Europe is best understood.
