Galician author Chus Pato, winner of the 2024 National Poetry Prize for her work ‘Sonora’

The Galician author María Jesús Pato Díaz, known as Chus Pato, has been awarded the 2025 National Poetry Prize for her work ‘Sonora’ (Xerais). The prize, awarded by the Ministry of Culture, is worth 30,000 euros.

The jury highlighted ‘Sonora’ for “being an experimental work, an expansive and concentrated conversation between the poem and death, which, after the mother’s orphanhood, drags readers towards the abysses of their own lineage. A true fulcrum of Galician poetry, Chus Pato explores new ways of deconstructing and reconstructing the frameworks of traditional poetic thought.”

The jury also noted that the collection of poems “creates textual spaces full of escapes: rhetoric, semantics, capable of hybridizing different codes in which all its inextinguishable sonorous power unfolds. In ‘Sonora’, personal, social and political memory, the multiple voices of one of the most daring contemporary poets whisper. In her work, Chus Pato shows us the approach of poetry as a transformative element of language.”

The award recognised Yolanda Castaño in its last edition, joining a long list of winners, including Miren Agur Meabe, Aurora Luque, Olga Novo, Pillar Pallarés and Antònia Vicens, among others.

The poet Chus Pato was born in Ourense in 1955 and is the author of several collections of poetry for which she has received awards such as the National Prize of Spanish Critics, in the Galician poetry category. Her poems have been published in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Portugal, Holland, Bulgaria, Russia, France and Belgium, among others, and her work has been included in dozens of national and international anthologies.

His first poems appeared in the magazine ‘Escrita’ (1984) and, subsequently, samples of his poetic work have appeared in the magazines ‘Luzes de Galiza’, ‘Festa da palabra silenciada’, ‘Andaina’, ‘Gume Ólisbos’, ‘Revista das letras’, ‘Dorna’ or ‘Clave Orión’, as well as in the books published by the Condado Poetry Festival.

She is a member of the PEN Club, Redes Escarlata and Mujeres y Letras, and on September 23, 2017 she joined the Real Academia Galega. Thus, ‘Sonora’ is the most recent collection of poems by the Galician writer and academic, published in Galician by the publishing house Xerais.

By Editor

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