Writer Julia Uceda, National Poetry Prize Winner, Dies at 98
Professor of Philology, lecturer at Anglo-Saxon universities, and writer, she presented her last book last year
The author Julia Uceda, winner of the National Poetry Prize in 2003 for the book 'In the Wind, Towards the Sea', passed away yesterday, Sunday, at the age of 98, according to the José Manuel Lara Foundation. "Our literature is in mourning today," stated the publishing house, which released her last book 'Complete Poems' last year.
"I have traveled all over the world, from Spain to the USA and everywhere in between, and I have returned from all those places. What led me to have such a life?" she said during her speech presenting this book in Ferrol, the Galician city she chose to live in during her retirement years after a long and successful career as a lecturer at various international universities.
With clarity, she continued: "I was just a few years old, if they were years, which I don't think they were, and I asked my parents, 'tell me, where was I before being here?' This 'here' has been very long; I don't know how far it will go, but it doesn't matter to me because I have to keep on the path. But I keep returning to that place from where I came before being here."
A poet of introspection and wonderment, as critics described her, she wrote a complex poetic work compiled into a single book titled 'In the Wind, Towards the Sea', published by Vandalia in 2003, with which she received the highest recognition for this literary genre.
Following that came 'Unknown Zone', which won the Critics' Award for poetry in 2006; the short story collection 'Light on a Frieze' (2008); the poetry collection 'Talking with a Beech Tree' (2010); and the anthology 'Old Secret Voices' (2017).
A member of the International Association of Hispanists, Uceda earned her PhD in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Seville, where she was born in 1925.
She became a professor at Michigan State University (United States) in 1965 and returned to Spain in 1973. She emigrated again three years later to Ireland, where she stayed for another three years. Since the mid-seventies, she had been living in Galicia.
