<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>The King and Queen will preside over the annual meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Cervantes Institute, the institution's highest governing body, next Tuesday, December 9th. The meeting will take place at the Royal Palace of Aranjuez starting at 12:30 p.m.</strong></h4> At the meeting, where the trustees will learn about the main data for the 2024-2025 academic year and the objectives and forecasts for the new academic year, in addition to the King (honorary president) and the Queen, the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez (executive president), and the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and Culture, Ernest Urtasun, will participate. The writer and 2023 Cervantes Prize winner, Luis Mateo Díez, is expected to attend the meeting at the Palace of Aranjuez, among other trustees. The Nicaraguan writer and 2017 Cervantes Prize winner, Sergio Ramírez; the writers Elvira Lindo and Rosa Montero; the writer Luis Landero; the flamenco singer Carmen Linares; the president of the Spanish Film Academy, Fernando Méndez-Leite; 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. The previous meeting of the Board of Trustees took place last February, also chaired by the King and Queen and attended by Sánchez, Albares, and Urtasun. The meeting was initially scheduled for early November 2024, but was canceled due to the DANA storm. <h5><strong>Ñ Award to María Delgado</strong></h5> Before the Board of Trustees meeting, the King and Queen will present the 2025 Ñ Award from the Cervantes Institute to British literary critic and Professor of Theatre and Film Arts at the University of London, María Delgado, in recognition of her work in promoting and disseminating the Spanish language internationally. The Ñ Award was created in 2021, as part of the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Cervantes Institute, to recognize the achievements of individuals (natural or legal persons, public or private) who, not being native Spanish speakers, have distinguished themselves through their work in promoting and disseminating our language internationally. The annual award consists of a bronze sculpture with the Cervantes Institute logo, inspired by the letter ñ, a characteristic symbol of the Spanish language. To date, the award has been given to Barbara Fuchs, professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (USA), translator, and founder of an initiative for the study of the Spanish Golden Age (2021); the Hispanist Gabriele Morelli (Campofilone, Italy, 1937), philologist and professor at the University of Bergamo, specializing in the Generation of '27 and the avant-garde movements (2022); the Hispanist Dieter Ingenshay (Isum, Germany, 1948), a leading promoter of Spanish culture in Germany (2023); and the South Korean Hispanist and philologist Park Chul, the first translator of Don Quixote into Korean (2024). Maria Delgado was born and educated in England to Spanish parents. Her father was one of the Basque children who arrived in England in May 1937. She is Professor of Theatre and Film Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, where she also serves as Vice-Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Exchange. Delgado, who has written or co-edited up to twenty books on theatre and film in Spanish and Catalan, has received numerous awards for her research and promotion of Spanish and Catalan culture. These include the Order of Isabella the Catholic (2002), the Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise (2016), and the Ramon Llull Foundation Prize for the international promotion of Catalan culture (2018). She was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2015, a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 2024, and an honorary fellow of Rose Bruford College, also in 2024.
