2019 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature
BIOGRAPHY
Siri Hustvedt (Northfield, Minnesota, USA, 19th February 1955), novelist, essayist and poet of Norwegian origin, graduated in History from St Olaf College, obtaining her PhD in English Literature from Columbia University in 1986 with a thesis on Charles Dickens (Figures of Dust. A Reading of “Our Mutual Friend”) in which her authors of reference already appear, including Kierkegaard, Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Freud, Lacan, Mary Douglas, Ricoeur and Julia Kristeva. An expert in neuroscience and psychoanalysis, her first publication was a poem in The Paris Review. In 1982, she published a collection of poetry, Reading to You. She met Paul Auster –2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature– at a poetry reading in 1981 and they were married the following year.
A scholar and intellectual who addresses the fundamental issues of contemporary ethics and epistemology, as well as being known for her feminist militancy, her work has contributed to interdisciplinary dialogue between the sciences and the humanities. She has published essays and articles in academic and scientific journals, including Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Seizure: European Journal of Epilepsy, Neuropsychoanalysis and Clinical Neurophysiology. Her collection of 32 lectures and articles delivered and published between 2005 and 2011, Living, Thinking, Looking (2012), is a sample of her profound, comprehensive scholarship in various disciplines. In this collection, she develops some of her favourite themes related to literature, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis and the neurosciences.
Translated into more than thirty languages, Hustvedt published her first novel, The Blindfold, in 1992 and achieved international renown with her third book, What I Loved (2003). In 2009, she published the essay entitled The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She likewise has a great interest in painting and has given talks on this subject at the Prado Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as publishing a volume of essays entitled Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (2005). Other works of hers include: The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), The Sorrows of an American (2008), The Summer Without Men (2011), The Blazing World (2014), Reading to You (1982), Yonder (1998) and A Plea for Eros (2005). Her last published essay is entitled A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women (2016).
WORKS
- 1983“Reading to You”
- 1992“The Blindfold”
- 1996“The Enchantment of Lily Dahl”
- 1998“Yonder”
- 2003“What I Loved”
- 2005“Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting”
- 2005“A Plea for Eros”
- 2008“The Sorrows of an American”
- 2010“The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves”
- 2011“The Summer Without Men”
- 2014“The Blazing World”
- 2017“A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women”
INTERVIEW
Siri Hustvedt speaks about "A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women”. Her new book includes various recently published essays in which she addresses topics such as contemporary art, neurosis in today's world and suicide, among others. Above all, however, Hustvedt speaks about literature and feminism.
10 FAVOURITES BOOKS
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01
"Fragments"
by Heraclitus
-
02
"Complete Works"
by Aristotle
-
03
"The King James
Bible" -
04
"Don Quixote"
by Miguel de Cervantes
-
05
"Either/Or"
by Soren Kierkegaard
-
06
"Wuthering Heights"
by Emily Brontë
-
07
"The Collected Poems"
by Emily Dickinson
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08
"Gravity and Grace"
by Simone Weil
-
09
"To the Lighthouse"
by Virginia Woolf
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10
"Process and Reality"
by Alfred North Whitehead
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Holder of an honorary degree from Stendhal University, Grenoble (2015), she received the 2004 Quebec Booksellers Award What I Loved and the 2012 Gabarron International Prize for Thought and Humanities for her research work and her ideas on philosophy, neuroscience and psychology.
At its meeting in Oviedo, the Jury for the 2019 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, composed of Xosé Ballesteros, Xuan Bello, Blanca Berasátegui, Jordi Gracia, Lola Larumbe Doral, Antonio Lucas, Carmen Millán, Rosa Navarro Durán, Leonardo Padura, Pablo Remón, Laura Revuelta, Ana Santos, Iker Seisdedos, Diana Sorensen, Juan Villoro, chaired by Santiago Muñoz Machado and with Fernando Rodríguez Lafuente acting as secretary, has decided to confer the 2019 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature on American writer Siri Hustvedt.
Her work is one of the most ambitious on today’s literary scene. Employing a feminist perspective, she addresses a variety of the facets that sketch a convulsive, disconcerting present. Furthermore, she does so using fiction and the essay, as an intellectual concerned with the fundamental issues of contemporary ethics. Translated into more than thirty languages, her work contributes to interdisciplinary dialogue between the humanities and the sciences.
Oviedo, 22nd May 2019
