Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

10 O viedo | C ampoamor T heatre | Over the years, several of them have regaled us with the beauty of their effort, their talent for sport and their aspirations, alongside the intelligence of their teamwork. If played in its true spirit, sport is synonymous with friendship, mutual help and solidarity amongst countries, and particularly amongst the sportsmen and women representing those countries. We are always inspired by the presence on stage of our Laureates, but the cyclists with us today almost represent a part of our own deeply felt hopes and aspirations, and stir special feelings in us. For this reason, we hope their efforts and determination will continue to be an example in the sports that our youngsters take up. Youth is also a key value to be highlighted in this year’s Award for the Arts, bestowed upon the Majorcan painter Miquel Barceló. Youth, tireless work and unquestionable creative originality are the foundations supporting the work of this outstanding figure of our arts, who has shone from the outset as few others have with the brilliance of originality. We are happy that our Awards not only recognize work that is the fruit of long life, but that they are also prepared to highlight work spawned by the creative drive of youth, that the fame and honour of an artist of the status of Miquel Barceló stems not from many years of work, but rather from the aesthetic value of that work. Miquel Barceló’s creative art has come about at critical times for international art, times when it is difficult to combine vanguard and tradition, to distinguish between the permanent and the ephemeral. At such a junction, the tireless Barceló has found many ways to unfurl his talents: painting, sculpture, sketch, ceramics and glass. As the most perceptive of experts have said, his work encompasses the whole range of mediums, with simple brush strokes always at the extremes, full of daring and inspiration, with material in constant metamorphosis combining with permanently fresh colours. The result is highly personal work, far from the postulates of groups and generations, engaged in a continual process of discovery. Barceló’s dedicated work leads him to endless discovery, because he knows that the true artist is always, as he himself has told us, “continually in the learning process, at the origins”, when it comes to creation. This faith in his origins, in his roots in the island of Majorca and, by extension, the whole of the Mediterranean world, is the fertile breeding ground of his paintings. The British writer Joanne Kathleen Rowling has been granted the Award for Concord. Somebody once said that the person who writes and leaves an imprint on the heart of a child will have done so for eternity. J.K. Rowling has done just that with the adventures of the character born of her creative talent, the wizard Harry Potter, read especially by millions of children, in whom we have witnessed the precious awakening of a passion for reading, so often sadly forgotten. Through her books, children of different ethnic groups and cultures have been united by the invisible but lasting links of a shared hobby, of fantasy and of the thirst for knowledge. With no other company than her dreams —dreams without which mankind’s heart and soul could not survive— Rowling’s powerful imagination combines the best traditions of children’s literature and adventure stories with the fostering of essential values such as solidarity, comradeship and loyalty in her books with fascinating narrative skills. A solitary sensitive hero, Harry Potter has given the joy of living in a world of imagination back to many children and adolescents; it has provided them with an infallible way of fleeing boredom and routine and has shepherded them away from the violence and despair that so offers irrupts in society. Rowling’s work has become an unprecedented human and sociological phenomenon in the culture of our times, thereby confirming the classic adage that “small things grow with concord; big things collapse with discord”. The Award for International Cooperation has been bestowed uponHis Excellency, The President of the Federative Republic of Brazil, Mr Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for the example that his own life “If played in its true spirit, sport is synonymous with friendship, mutual help and solidarity amongst countries, and particularly amongst the sportsmen and women representing those countries.” 24 th O ctober 2003