The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, has appointed the cartoonist and 2008 National Comic Award winner, Paco Roca, and the director of the Alberti Bookstore, Lola Larumbe, as new members of the Royal Board of Trustees of the National Library of Spain (BNE).
The new members of the Board of Directors are: Francisco Martínez Roca ‘Paco Roca’ and María Dolores Larumbe, who have been appointed by other members such as Alicia Sellés Carot, Carmen Chaparro Martínez, Gregorio Marañón and Bertrán de Lis, Ibán García del Blanco, José María Lasalle Ruiz and Sandra Ollo Razquin, according to a report by the Culture Ministry.
As established by the BNE Statute, the Royal Board of Trustees is made up of a minimum of seventeen members and a maximum of thirty, eleven of whom are ex officio members.
The remaining members are designated and are appointed and dismissed by the head of the Ministry of Culture – who, according to the Statute, is the president of the BNE in accordance with Law 1/2015, of March 24 – from among people of recognized prestige or competence in the field of culture, scientific research and economics or who have distinguished themselves by their collaboration or support for the National Library of Spain.
Specifically, the appointed members, in this case Paco Roca and Lola Larumbe, will serve their term for a period of three years, which may be renewed up to two times for periods of equal duration.
Roca was born in Valencia in 1969 and studied at the city’s School of Art and Superior Design. In 2021 he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts, and thanks to his work ‘Arrugas’ he won the 2008 National Comic Award, the Barcelona Comic Fair Award, the Dolmen de la Crítica, the Madrid Expocómic, the Romics de Roma Grand Prix and the Gran Guinigi de Lucca Award. In addition, the work was adapted for the cinema by Ignacio Ferreras in 2011, winning several Goya awards.
On the other hand, Larumbe was born in Madrid and has a degree in Biological Sciences, although her relationship with the world of books began in 1980 at the Rafael Alberti Bookstore, located in the capital and of which she is currently the director. She has been awarded the Cultural Bookseller Prize in 2005 and the Liber-Boixareu Prize 2019, among others, as well as for the ‘Encuentros en Alberti’ project, with which she has managed to turn the bookstore space into one of “the cultural references in Madrid”, according to Cultura.