Galician Chus Pato Wins National Poetry Prize with 'Sonora'

The Galician writer and academic María Jesús Pato Díaz (Ourense, 1955), known as Chus Pato in the poetry world, is the winner of the National Poetry Prize, awarded annually by the Ministry of Culture and endowed with 30,000 euros. She received it for her poems collected in 'Sonora', a title published last year by Xerais that deals with the mourning for her mother's death.

Winner of the Critics' Prize, Pato conceives poetry as a transformative element of language. She is a member of PEN Club, Redes Escarlata, and Women and Letters, and on September 23, 2017, she joined the Royal Galician Academy.

'Sonora' is the most recent collection of poems by one of the key authors of contemporary Galician lyric poetry. It is being translated into Spanish by Gonzalo Hermo for Ultramarinos publishing house. In her verses, Pato delves into personal, social, and political memory through multiple voices.

It is "an experimental work" conceived as "an expansive and concentrated conversation between the poem and death," which, "after the orphanhood of the mother, drags readers into the abysses of their own lineage," according to the jury that awarded her.

A reference in Galician poetry, Pato "explores new ways to deconstruct and reconstruct the frameworks of traditional poetic thought," said the jury's minutes about a collection that "creates textual spaces filled with escapes: rhetorical, semantic, capable of hybridizing different codes in which all its inexhaustible sonic power unfolds."

Pato has published the collections 'Urania' (1991), 'Heloísa' (1994), 'Fascinio' (1995), 'Nínive' (1996), 'A ponte das poldras' (1996), 'm-Talá', 'Un Ganges de palabras' (bilingual Galician-Spanish anthology, 2003), 'Charenton' (2004), 'Nacer é unha república de árbores' (2010), 'Carne de Leviatán' (2013), 'Un libre favor' (2019).

Her first poems appeared in the magazine 'Escrita' in 1984 and later in 'Luzes de Galiza', 'Festa da palabra silenciada', 'Andaina', 'Gume', 'Ólisbos', 'Revista das letras', 'Dorna', or 'Clave Orión', as well as in books published by the Condado Poetry Festival. Collected in dozens of national and international anthologies, her verses have been published in Argentina, Chile, Portugal, Holland, Bulgaria, Russia, France, and Belgium.

Pato takes over from Yolanda Castaño, joining a long list of awardees that includes Miren Agur Meabe, Aurora Luque, Olga Novo, Pillar Pallarés, and Antònia Vicens.