Humberto Lopez Morales wins the II annual Isabel Polanco International Essay Prize

The Cuban academic and linguist Humberto Lopez Morales has won the second annual Isabel Polanco International Essay Prize for his work La andadura del español por el mundo (The global evolution of Spanish) in a unanimous decision by the jury in Guadalajara, Mexico. The jury, presided over by Ricardo Lagos, and including Concepción Company, José G. Moreno de Alba, Laura Restrepo, Daniel Samper and Gonzalo Celorio, as permanent secretary, praised "the conceptual rigor of the academic essay as well as its accessibility and clear writing style... The work offers a comprehensive survey of the Spanish language across both time and the vast territory in which it is spoken."

Humberto Lopez Morales (born in Havana in 1936) is secretary general of the Association of Academics of the Spanish Language, holds a PhD in Romance Languages from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and has been awarded the degree of doctor honoris causa by a number of Spanish and Latin American universities. He is a member of the Advisory Council for the Departamento de Español Urgente and president of the History of the Spanish Language Association. He has also sat on the board of trustees of the Instituto Cervantes and its administrative board.

The prize is worth 100,000 dollars and comes with a commemorative sculpture by the artist Martín Chirino and recognizes work of excellence in the field of essay. Candidates this year came from eight countries: Argentina, Colombia, the US, Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. The theme of this year's award was the Spanish Language - its unity and diversity, its past, present and future, its relationship to other languages and its literary, cultural and economic potential - and was open to all relevant disciplines and methodologies.

The awards ceremony will be held in November during the Guadalajara International Book Fair (Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara - FIL) and the winning work will be published by Taurus and distributed throughout Latin America, Spain and the US in December.

The award was launched by the Guadalajara International Book Fair in collaboration with the Fundación Santillana in June, 2008, and is named in honor of the late CEO of Grupo Santillana, Isabel Polanco, who worked ceaselessly at the helm of the Group to develop all the business lines and to significantly expand the scope of the publishing house in the Ibero-American world. The first award, in 2009, went to the essayist and historian Rafael Rojas (Cuba, 1965) for his work Las repúblicas de aire: Utopía y desencanto en la Revolución de Hispanoamérica (Republics of air: Utopia and disenchantment in the Hispano-American Revolution).