Philip Roth Prince of Asturias Award for Literature 2012

"I am delighted to receive the Prince of Asturias Award and thrilled that the jury should have found my work worthy of such an honor.

It is particularly poignant for me to have gotten news of the award only a few weeks after the death of Carlos Fuentes, who received the award in 1994. Carlos was a dear friend of mine and a generous colleague for many decades and, of course, he was among the greatest novelists writing in Spanish in our era. I wish he were alive so that I could hear his mellifluous voice at the other end of the phone offering me congratulations in his courtly way."

Philip Roth
New York, 6th June 2012