Sant Jordi

Cristina Rivera Garza, born in Matamoros, Mexico, in 1964 is an author, translator and critic. Notable works in her prolific career include Autobiografía del algodón [translated into English as The Autobiography of Cotton] (Random House, 2022), El invencible verano de Liliana [translated into English as Liliana’s Invincible Summer] (Random House, 2021; winner of a 2024 Pulitzer Prize and shortlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction), her collected poems Me llamo cuerpo que no está [My Name is a Body That Isn’t Here] (Lumen, 2024) and Terrestre [By Land] (Random House, 2025), her latest book.

In 2020 she received the MacArthur Fellowship, and she is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where she founded the Creative Writing in Spanish PhD program. In addition to the Pulitzer, she has won the José Donoso, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (twice), Anna Seghers, Shirley Jackson and Roger Caillois prizes.

Her latest book, Terrestre, is an imaginative work about friendship, youth and the power of transformation, bringing together speculative fiction, travel literature and words at their most free.

She now joins the list of distinguished guests who have received the honour of giving this speech in Barcelona since 2003: Quino, José Saramago, Martí de Riquer, Emili Teixidor, Antonio Tabucchi, Alessandro Baricco, Bernardo Atxaga, José Luis Sampedro, Josep Maria Castellet, Raimon, Albert Sánchez Piñol, Donna Leon, John Banville, Claudio Magris, Yasmina Reza, Almudena Grandes, Mia Couto, Empar Moliner, Irene Vallejo, Imma Monsó, Gemma Ruiz and David Walliams.