<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>The King and Queen will chair the annual meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Instituto Cervantes this Wednesday, in which they will present the “Premio Ñ” to the South Korean Hispanist and philologist Park Chul, the first translator of Don Quixote into Korean.</strong></h4> In addition to Don Felipe (honorary president) and Doña Letizia, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez (executive president), and the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares; of Education and Vocational Training, Pilar Alegría, and of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, will participate in the session of the Board of Trustees. The meeting will take place at the Royal Palace of El Pardo in Madrid and will allow the trustees to learn about the main data of the 2023-2024 academic year, as well as the objectives and forecasts for the new academic year. The annual meeting of the Board of Trustees was initially scheduled for early November, but the Royal House announced the suspension of “the entire agenda” of the King and Queen as a result of the DANA crisis in Valencia. The attendance at the El Pardo Palace is expected to include, among other patrons, the writer and 2023 Cervantes Prize winner, Luis Mateo Díez; the Nicaraguan writer and 2017 Cervantes Prize winner, Sergio Ramírez; the writer Elvira Lindo; the director of the RAE, Santiago Muñoz Machado; the Mexican writer and editor Gonzalo Celorio; the president of the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE), Eva Alcón; the director of the Inca Garcilaso Cultural Center (Peru), Hernando Torres-Fernández; the president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Jaime Domínguez; the rector of the National University of Distance Education (UNED), Ricardo Mairal; and the president of the Association for the Teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language (ASELE), Javier Muñoz-Basols. <h5><strong>Ñ Award</strong></h5> Before the Patronage, the King and Queen will present the Instituto Cervantes 2024 Ñ Award to the Korean Hispanist Park Chul (1949), emeritus professor of Hispanic Literature at Hankuk University in South Korea and one of the greatest experts on Cervantes and Quixote issues in his country. He has been a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy for Korea since 2009. A PhD holder from the Complutense University of Madrid (1985), Park Chul had the honour of becoming, in 2015, the first translator of Don Quixote into Korean, using the original Spanish for the first time, given that until then almost all translations came from English or Japanese editions. This award was created in 2021, as part of the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of the Instituto Cervantes, to recognize the career of those people who, not being native Spanish speakers, have distinguished themselves by their work in promoting and promoting our language internationally. The annual award consists of a bronze sculpture with the Instituto Cervantes logo, inspired by the letter ñ, characteristic of the Spanish language. To date, the winners of the award have been Barbara Fuchs, professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (United States), translator and founder of an initiative for the knowledge of the Spanish Golden Age (2021); the Hispanist Gabriele Morelli (Campofilone, Italy, 1937), philologist and professor at the University of Bergamo and specialist in the Generation of '27 and the avant-garde movements (2022); and the Hispanist Dieter Ingenshay (Isum, Germany, 1948), a prominent disseminator of Spanish culture in Germany (2023). The Instituto Cervantes is the public institution created by Spain in 1991 to universally promote the teaching, study and use of Spanish and to contribute to the dissemination of Hispanic cultures abroad. Dependent on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it collaborates with prestigious national and international institutions, both public and private, with the aim of ensuring that products and services related to Spanish are governed by quality criteria and to promote the encounter and exchange of Spanish and Pan-Hispanic culture with other cultures of the world. In its activities, the Instituto Cervantes primarily focuses on the linguistic and cultural heritage that is common to the countries and peoples of the Spanish-speaking community. It is present in more than 90 cities in 45 countries, through its centers, classrooms and extensions, on the five continents. In addition, it has two offices in Spain, the central office in Madrid and the office in Alcalá de Henares.
