07.06.12 | Charlotte Williams - The Bookseller

US novelist Philip Roth has been awarded Spain's most prestigious literary prize, a Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, being presented with €50,000 and a Joan Miro sculpture.

The award, which seeks to reward the individual or group "whose literary work represents a significant contribution to universal literature", was announced yesterday (7th June), in Oviedo, northern Spain. Roth, whose work includes American Pastoral, Portnoy's Complaint, The Human Stain and Nemesis, is published in the UK by Vintage.

The judging panel said: "The narrative work of Philip Roth forms part of the great American novel, in the tradition of Dos Passos, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow and Malamud."
Roth paid tribute to his friend, the late Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, in his acceptance speech, saying: "It is particularly poignant for me to have gotten news of the award only a few weeks after the death of Carlos Fuentes, who received the award in 1994 . . . I wish he were alive so that I could hear his mellifluous voice at the other end of the phone offering me congratulations in his courtly way."

The Prince of Asturias Awards also reward individuals in the arts, social sciences, communication and humanities, technical and scientific research, international cooperation, peace and sports.