Cristina Fernández Cubas wins the 2026 Cervantes Prize
The highest honour in Spanish-language letters celebrates a writer who renewed the short story and fantastic fiction.
Cristina Fernández Cubas has won the 2026 Cervantes Prize, announced by Spain’s Ministry of Culture in Madrid on 3 November. Worth €125,000, the award recognises a career that restored the short story’s central place and transformed fantastic literature in Spanish. The jury highlighted her precision of viewpoint, use of silence and sustained ambiguity, through which the unsettling enters ordinary life without reassuring explanations. Born in Arenys de Mar in 1945, Fernández Cubas is the author of collections including Mi hermana Elba, El ángulo del horror and La habitación de Nona. She becomes the seventh woman to receive the foremost distinction in Hispanic letters and a reference point for later generations of writers.