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Princess of Asturias Awards: In skiing, education, theatre, immigration studies, and more
19/10/2019
SHORT of an actual Nobel Prize, probably one of the most prestigious honours anyone on earth can win is Spain's national version, the Princess of Asturias Awards – if you're decorated in your field by the foundation chaired by the country's 14-year-old heir to the throne, you know you've arrived and have little left to achieve.
For the first time, the prizegiving – once the Prince of Asturias Awards but known in the feminine for the past five years since the Prince in question became King – was opened by its young leader, HRH Leonor, on Thursday evening, and the actual presentation to the successful candidates was last night (Friday).
Last year saw veteran film director Martin Scorsese, mountaineers Reinhold Messner and Krzysztof Wielicki, and Parisian novelist Fred Vargas – female, and whose real name is Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau – were among the winners of Princess of Asturias Awards, and past editions have seen prizes go to the late Stephen Hawking, Bob Dylan, Jane Goodall, Rafa Nadal, Severiano Ballesteros, Pau and Marc Gasol, Nelson Mandela, Margaret 'Handmaid's Tale' Atwood, and even Google.
Here's a round-up of those who took home one of the planet's most prestigious prizes last night.
Siri Hustvedt (Letters)
Married to an earlier Princess of Asturias Award winner, The New York Trilogy author Paul Auster, US-born Norwegian novelist Siri (first picture) has also written a book of poetry, a long string of essays on the visual arts, psychology and psychiatry, history and philosophy, and her work The Shaking Woman, or a History of my Nerves tells of her lifelong seizure disorder. Part of her novel The Blindfold was made into a film by French director Claude Miller and the story's narrator, Iris, later became a character in her husband's novel Leviathan.
Siri's best-selling and best-known novels among the seven she has written are What I Loved, about the relationship between art historian Leo and painter Bill, their families' close ties, and the themes of love and loss, art, grief, hysteria and eating disorders; and The Sorrows of an American, about the trials and tribulations of four generations of a US-based Norwegian family, their buried past, psychological conditions, loves and losses, and one character's PTSD through witnessing the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.
Siri, 64, earned three honorary PhDs in as many years between 2014 and 2016, from the University of Oslo, Norway; the Université Stendhal-Grenoble, France, and the Gutenberg University-Mainz, Germany, in that order.
Lindsey Vonn (Sports)
Born in the same State as Siri Hustvedt – Minnesota – 'Snow Queen' Lindsey Vonn (née Kildow), 34, won a gold and a bronze Winter Olympic medals in Vancouver 2010 for downhill skiing and super-G respectively, two world championship titles in Val d'Isère, France in 2009, plus three silvers (2007 and 2011) and two bronzes (2015 and 2017), four golds, two silvers and a bronze at World Cup events between 2008 and 2016, and 82 class victories among 130 podiums in the latter.
Unsurprisingly, Lindsey (second picture) holds the record as the woman with the most Alpine Ski World Cup victories in history, way ahead of Austria's Annemarie Moser-Pröll's 62 and only four behind the most World Cup wins ever, a record set by Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark, with 86.
Mrs Vonn is one of just six women who have won World Cup events in all five alpine skiing disciplines – downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom and super-combined.
Her best season to date was winter 2011-2012, with 12 race victories: five downhill, four super-G, two giant slalom and one super-combined.
With little left to achieve – other than a Princess of Asturias Award for Sports, which she collected last night – Lindsey retired at the end of this year's season.
In her personal life, she was in a two-year relationship with golf legend Tiger Woods, married for four years to athlete Thomas Vonn, whose surname she retains, and is now engaged to P. K. Subban, whom she has been with for 16 months.
Peter Brook (Arts)
Described as the 'King of Experimental Theatre', the 94-year-old son of Latvian Jews forced to flee their former USSR native land for London when World War I broke out was a young teenager when international conflict returned, but in educational terms, was one of the more fortunate: Peter Brook was not forced to leave school to work, filling vacancies left by men fighting on the front line, and even made it to Oxford University before making his stage director début in the final year of the war, aged just 20.
The young prodigy was only 22 when he became director of London's Royal Opera House, a rôle he held for three years, until 1950. Peter would spend the next decade working on a long string of productions in the US and Europe, before returning to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1962, aged 37, and joining the then newly-founded Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), for whom he directed numerous productions over the next eight years before emigrating to Paris at the dawn of the 1970s.
Peter (third picture) was married to actress Natasha Parry for 64 years before her death aged 85 in 2015.
Films he has directed include The Mahabharata, Lord of the Flies, Marat/Sade, King Lear, Tell me Lies, and The Tightrope in 2012.
During his acceptance speech, Mr Brook made his feelings about world politics very apparent: “Politicians make many mistakes, but the stupidest they've committed in the last few years, and I dare say in history, is Brexit.”
As a war teen, Peter spoke from personal experience: “The EU was an ideal that sought consensus to avoid battles and upheavals, achieve what would be the United States of Europe, and for people to realise there was more to life and that we could all live together in peace. Brexit is a tragedy.
“A referendum is a good democratic tool, but this time it didn't serve its purpose. You can only answer 'yes' or 'no' to a question when you know everything there is to know about the issue, the way British Parliament does: MPs spend a whole week studying issues before taking a decision. But the people were forced to make a decision without being informed of the consequences for farming, the stock market, finances...there were people who suddenly started seeing foreigners going along to their locals and they didn't like it, so to stop it, they thought the best thing to do was to vote 'yes' to Brexit to chuck them out. You can't make decisions like that.”
Salman Khan and The Khan Academy (Cooperation)
As well as making school subjects interesting to young learners, 43-year-old YouTuber Salman Khan's online video-based academy basically means any child in the world can 'go to school' as long as they have access to internet. Although that is not always the case in the third world, centres have been set up across Asia and Africa in rural areas for kids to learn, since often, lack of or limited classroom education in the developing world is due to lack of community resources: in some countries, pupils have to split their days, with one group going to class in the mornings and another in the afternoon, since there are not enough schools and teachers to go round. YouTube classrooms also mean girls in particular, in areas where internet is available but culture means females are barred from staying in education as long as boys, can carry on their learning.
With an MBA from Harvard, Khan (fourth picture) – born in Louisiana, USA, to an Indian mother and Bangladeshi father – started his teaching career aged 27 informally: helping his cousin Nadia with her maths using the Yahoo Doodle notepad. His YouTube-based Khan Academy had clocked up 1.6 billion viewings by the beginning of last year, and he set up the Coach feature in 2012, helping teachers and students to use video tools for learning and education.
Mainly focusing on maths and the sciences at first, Salman has branched out into a wide range of subjects, and plans to add English as a foreign language shortly.
Aged just 36, he was included in Time magazine's worldwide annual 100 Most Influential People list and featured on the cover of Forbes.
Now married to Umaima Marvi, a doctor, and with children of his own, Salman Khan lives in Mountain View, California.
City of Gdańsk, Poland (Concordance)
Poland's largest seaport, the biggest city in the Pomeranian province and the country's fourth metropolis in terms of size, with the main hub home to 466,631 or, including the wider suburbs, 1.4 million, is now a major tourism destination served by regular Ryanair flights and its stunning centre and waterfront, with beautiful, colourful and very central-European architecture and absolutely replete with historical heritage sites could keep any visitor on their feet for days, if not weeks.You need to wrap up warm most of the year, though – during the coldest month, January, average lows fall to -4ºC, and even in the height of summer, typical temperatures rarely go much above 22ºC.
Gdańsk (fifth picture), known in German and, often, internationally, as Danzig, became an icon of resistance against the Nazis and fight for freedom in Europe, not just during World War II but during the post-war communist years – and is, according to the panel of judges behind the Princess of Asturias Awards, 'an example of sensitivity through suffering, of solidarity, defence of freedom and human rights, and extraordinary generosity.
European Council president Donald Tusk, who was Polish prime minister between 2007 and 2014, was born in Gdańsk and, during his university years in the city, was an active campaigner against communism who, along with his fellow students, was arrested on at least one occasion during protests.
El Prado Museum, Madrid (Communication and Humanities)
One of the 'Big Three' art galleries in Spain's capital, the El Prado Museum needs little introduction: among the world's largest and most recognised with over three million visitors every year, El Prado has long been held as an icon of Spanish, and global, culture.
Whilst El Prado, like its sisters the Thyssen-Bornemizsa and the Reina Sofía – the latter home to Picasso's Gernika and Dalí's melting clocks – has a hugely international presence among its 7,000 paintings, it is arguably the place to be to find the most key works by Spain's most famous artists from El Greco to Goya, via Ribera, Ribalta, Velázquez and Zurbarán.
Major non-Spanish works include the Flemish school, given that the Benelux was part of Spain's Habsburg Empire during the Middle Ages, Renaissance era, and early Romantic period, with world-renowned pieces by the likes of Rubens and Rembrandt, and Italian art by Caravaggio, Fra Angelico, Antonello da Messina and Rafael.
Among the must-sees are Las Meninas, or 'The Maids of Honour', by Diego Velázquez and Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.
Joanne Chory and Sandra Myrna Díaz (Scientific and Technological Research)
Probably the hottest topic on earth today, climate change was bound to figure somewhere in this year's Princess of Asturias Awards, and biologists and botanists Joanne Chory, from the USA and Sandra Myrna Díaz, from Argentina share the prize for research in science and technology for their studies of plants and what they can tell us about the process of global warming.
Dr Chory's work focuses on molecular and genetic responses of plants to changes in environment, especially light and temperature, the results of which help us to understand how nature is affected by climate change and what we can do to improve and adapt ecosystems to cope.
This is not just crucial in terms of protecting the countryside, but also in preserving crops, since in huge swathes of the world, communities rely entirely on what they can successfully grow in order to eat or to sell for their living.
Dr Myrna's work, which is independent from Dr Chory's, focuses on quantifying the need for conservation of functional biodiversity to guarantee that the benefits of ecosystems on the human race continue in the face of changing climate – again, crops, but also, for example, cleaner air; trees eat up harmful carbon dioxide, turn it into oxygen and pump it out, meaning without them, we would literally struggle to breathe and air pollution, which already kills one in every 1,000 people worldwide each year, would rocket.
Alejandro Portes (Social Sciences)
One of the world's most prestigious sociologists, Cuban Alejandro Portes has the last word on immigration: second-generation foreigners, or children of original migrants born in their parents' adopted countries, are overwhelmingly positive for all aspects of national societies, socially, culturally and economically.
Dr Portes is one of these – his parents were Cuban and he was born and grew up in the USA – and he describes it as an 'honour' to receive the most prestigious national award possible in a country where immigrants and their children 'are able to integrate and develop as people so easily'.
This, as any expat in Spain will tell you, is very true: it is extremely rare to encounter an 'us-and-them' attitude to foreigners on Spanish soil, since natives consider that 'all of us are immigrants somewhere down the line', and the country has a centuries-long history of welcoming incomers from all over the planet and becoming migrants themselves.
Dr Portes' work has mainly focused on migrant communities and international migration, one of the biggest challenges faced by modern society, not least for the migrants themselves, and firmly believes that entrants into new countries need support and guidance so the phenomenon can be 'managed' properly for everyone's benefit.
His key works, of especial relevance in his country of birth and his family's adopted country, include Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigration in the United States and City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami, still very appropriate today even though they were published in 1985 and 1993 respectively, and the more subjective, recent works, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation, of 2001, and Spanish Legacies: The Coming of Age of the Second Generation, from 2016.
Related Topics
SHORT of an actual Nobel Prize, probably one of the most prestigious honours anyone on earth can win is Spain's national version, the Princess of Asturias Awards – if you're decorated in your field by the foundation chaired by the country's 14-year-old heir to the throne, you know you've arrived and have little left to achieve.
For the first time, the prizegiving – once the Prince of Asturias Awards but known in the feminine for the past five years since the Prince in question became King – was opened by its young leader, HRH Leonor, on Thursday evening, and the actual presentation to the successful candidates was last night (Friday).
Last year saw veteran film director Martin Scorsese, mountaineers Reinhold Messner and Krzysztof Wielicki, and Parisian novelist Fred Vargas – female, and whose real name is Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau – were among the winners of Princess of Asturias Awards, and past editions have seen prizes go to the late Stephen Hawking, Bob Dylan, Jane Goodall, Rafa Nadal, Severiano Ballesteros, Pau and Marc Gasol, Nelson Mandela, Margaret 'Handmaid's Tale' Atwood, and even Google.
Here's a round-up of those who took home one of the planet's most prestigious prizes last night.
Siri Hustvedt (Letters)
Married to an earlier Princess of Asturias Award winner, The New York Trilogy author Paul Auster, US-born Norwegian novelist Siri (first picture) has also written a book of poetry, a long string of essays on the visual arts, psychology and psychiatry, history and philosophy, and her work The Shaking Woman, or a History of my Nerves tells of her lifelong seizure disorder. Part of her novel The Blindfold was made into a film by French director Claude Miller and the story's narrator, Iris, later became a character in her husband's novel Leviathan.
Siri's best-selling and best-known novels among the seven she has written are What I Loved, about the relationship between art historian Leo and painter Bill, their families' close ties, and the themes of love and loss, art, grief, hysteria and eating disorders; and The Sorrows of an American, about the trials and tribulations of four generations of a US-based Norwegian family, their buried past, psychological conditions, loves and losses, and one character's PTSD through witnessing the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.
Siri, 64, earned three honorary PhDs in as many years between 2014 and 2016, from the University of Oslo, Norway; the Université Stendhal-Grenoble, France, and the Gutenberg University-Mainz, Germany, in that order.
Lindsey Vonn (Sports)
Born in the same State as Siri Hustvedt – Minnesota – 'Snow Queen' Lindsey Vonn (née Kildow), 34, won a gold and a bronze Winter Olympic medals in Vancouver 2010 for downhill skiing and super-G respectively, two world championship titles in Val d'Isère, France in 2009, plus three silvers (2007 and 2011) and two bronzes (2015 and 2017), four golds, two silvers and a bronze at World Cup events between 2008 and 2016, and 82 class victories among 130 podiums in the latter.
Unsurprisingly, Lindsey (second picture) holds the record as the woman with the most Alpine Ski World Cup victories in history, way ahead of Austria's Annemarie Moser-Pröll's 62 and only four behind the most World Cup wins ever, a record set by Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark, with 86.
Mrs Vonn is one of just six women who have won World Cup events in all five alpine skiing disciplines – downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom and super-combined.
Her best season to date was winter 2011-2012, with 12 race victories: five downhill, four super-G, two giant slalom and one super-combined.
With little left to achieve – other than a Princess of Asturias Award for Sports, which she collected last night – Lindsey retired at the end of this year's season.
In her personal life, she was in a two-year relationship with golf legend Tiger Woods, married for four years to athlete Thomas Vonn, whose surname she retains, and is now engaged to P. K. Subban, whom she has been with for 16 months.
Peter Brook (Arts)
Described as the 'King of Experimental Theatre', the 94-year-old son of Latvian Jews forced to flee their former USSR native land for London when World War I broke out was a young teenager when international conflict returned, but in educational terms, was one of the more fortunate: Peter Brook was not forced to leave school to work, filling vacancies left by men fighting on the front line, and even made it to Oxford University before making his stage director début in the final year of the war, aged just 20.
The young prodigy was only 22 when he became director of London's Royal Opera House, a rôle he held for three years, until 1950. Peter would spend the next decade working on a long string of productions in the US and Europe, before returning to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1962, aged 37, and joining the then newly-founded Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), for whom he directed numerous productions over the next eight years before emigrating to Paris at the dawn of the 1970s.
Peter (third picture) was married to actress Natasha Parry for 64 years before her death aged 85 in 2015.
Films he has directed include The Mahabharata, Lord of the Flies, Marat/Sade, King Lear, Tell me Lies, and The Tightrope in 2012.
During his acceptance speech, Mr Brook made his feelings about world politics very apparent: “Politicians make many mistakes, but the stupidest they've committed in the last few years, and I dare say in history, is Brexit.”
As a war teen, Peter spoke from personal experience: “The EU was an ideal that sought consensus to avoid battles and upheavals, achieve what would be the United States of Europe, and for people to realise there was more to life and that we could all live together in peace. Brexit is a tragedy.
“A referendum is a good democratic tool, but this time it didn't serve its purpose. You can only answer 'yes' or 'no' to a question when you know everything there is to know about the issue, the way British Parliament does: MPs spend a whole week studying issues before taking a decision. But the people were forced to make a decision without being informed of the consequences for farming, the stock market, finances...there were people who suddenly started seeing foreigners going along to their locals and they didn't like it, so to stop it, they thought the best thing to do was to vote 'yes' to Brexit to chuck them out. You can't make decisions like that.”
Salman Khan and The Khan Academy (Cooperation)
As well as making school subjects interesting to young learners, 43-year-old YouTuber Salman Khan's online video-based academy basically means any child in the world can 'go to school' as long as they have access to internet. Although that is not always the case in the third world, centres have been set up across Asia and Africa in rural areas for kids to learn, since often, lack of or limited classroom education in the developing world is due to lack of community resources: in some countries, pupils have to split their days, with one group going to class in the mornings and another in the afternoon, since there are not enough schools and teachers to go round. YouTube classrooms also mean girls in particular, in areas where internet is available but culture means females are barred from staying in education as long as boys, can carry on their learning.
With an MBA from Harvard, Khan (fourth picture) – born in Louisiana, USA, to an Indian mother and Bangladeshi father – started his teaching career aged 27 informally: helping his cousin Nadia with her maths using the Yahoo Doodle notepad. His YouTube-based Khan Academy had clocked up 1.6 billion viewings by the beginning of last year, and he set up the Coach feature in 2012, helping teachers and students to use video tools for learning and education.
Mainly focusing on maths and the sciences at first, Salman has branched out into a wide range of subjects, and plans to add English as a foreign language shortly.
Aged just 36, he was included in Time magazine's worldwide annual 100 Most Influential People list and featured on the cover of Forbes.
Now married to Umaima Marvi, a doctor, and with children of his own, Salman Khan lives in Mountain View, California.
City of Gdańsk, Poland (Concordance)
Poland's largest seaport, the biggest city in the Pomeranian province and the country's fourth metropolis in terms of size, with the main hub home to 466,631 or, including the wider suburbs, 1.4 million, is now a major tourism destination served by regular Ryanair flights and its stunning centre and waterfront, with beautiful, colourful and very central-European architecture and absolutely replete with historical heritage sites could keep any visitor on their feet for days, if not weeks.You need to wrap up warm most of the year, though – during the coldest month, January, average lows fall to -4ºC, and even in the height of summer, typical temperatures rarely go much above 22ºC.
Gdańsk (fifth picture), known in German and, often, internationally, as Danzig, became an icon of resistance against the Nazis and fight for freedom in Europe, not just during World War II but during the post-war communist years – and is, according to the panel of judges behind the Princess of Asturias Awards, 'an example of sensitivity through suffering, of solidarity, defence of freedom and human rights, and extraordinary generosity.
European Council president Donald Tusk, who was Polish prime minister between 2007 and 2014, was born in Gdańsk and, during his university years in the city, was an active campaigner against communism who, along with his fellow students, was arrested on at least one occasion during protests.
El Prado Museum, Madrid (Communication and Humanities)
One of the 'Big Three' art galleries in Spain's capital, the El Prado Museum needs little introduction: among the world's largest and most recognised with over three million visitors every year, El Prado has long been held as an icon of Spanish, and global, culture.
Whilst El Prado, like its sisters the Thyssen-Bornemizsa and the Reina Sofía – the latter home to Picasso's Gernika and Dalí's melting clocks – has a hugely international presence among its 7,000 paintings, it is arguably the place to be to find the most key works by Spain's most famous artists from El Greco to Goya, via Ribera, Ribalta, Velázquez and Zurbarán.
Major non-Spanish works include the Flemish school, given that the Benelux was part of Spain's Habsburg Empire during the Middle Ages, Renaissance era, and early Romantic period, with world-renowned pieces by the likes of Rubens and Rembrandt, and Italian art by Caravaggio, Fra Angelico, Antonello da Messina and Rafael.
Among the must-sees are Las Meninas, or 'The Maids of Honour', by Diego Velázquez and Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.
Joanne Chory and Sandra Myrna Díaz (Scientific and Technological Research)
Probably the hottest topic on earth today, climate change was bound to figure somewhere in this year's Princess of Asturias Awards, and biologists and botanists Joanne Chory, from the USA and Sandra Myrna Díaz, from Argentina share the prize for research in science and technology for their studies of plants and what they can tell us about the process of global warming.
Dr Chory's work focuses on molecular and genetic responses of plants to changes in environment, especially light and temperature, the results of which help us to understand how nature is affected by climate change and what we can do to improve and adapt ecosystems to cope.
This is not just crucial in terms of protecting the countryside, but also in preserving crops, since in huge swathes of the world, communities rely entirely on what they can successfully grow in order to eat or to sell for their living.
Dr Myrna's work, which is independent from Dr Chory's, focuses on quantifying the need for conservation of functional biodiversity to guarantee that the benefits of ecosystems on the human race continue in the face of changing climate – again, crops, but also, for example, cleaner air; trees eat up harmful carbon dioxide, turn it into oxygen and pump it out, meaning without them, we would literally struggle to breathe and air pollution, which already kills one in every 1,000 people worldwide each year, would rocket.
Alejandro Portes (Social Sciences)
One of the world's most prestigious sociologists, Cuban Alejandro Portes has the last word on immigration: second-generation foreigners, or children of original migrants born in their parents' adopted countries, are overwhelmingly positive for all aspects of national societies, socially, culturally and economically.
Dr Portes is one of these – his parents were Cuban and he was born and grew up in the USA – and he describes it as an 'honour' to receive the most prestigious national award possible in a country where immigrants and their children 'are able to integrate and develop as people so easily'.
This, as any expat in Spain will tell you, is very true: it is extremely rare to encounter an 'us-and-them' attitude to foreigners on Spanish soil, since natives consider that 'all of us are immigrants somewhere down the line', and the country has a centuries-long history of welcoming incomers from all over the planet and becoming migrants themselves.
Dr Portes' work has mainly focused on migrant communities and international migration, one of the biggest challenges faced by modern society, not least for the migrants themselves, and firmly believes that entrants into new countries need support and guidance so the phenomenon can be 'managed' properly for everyone's benefit.
His key works, of especial relevance in his country of birth and his family's adopted country, include Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigration in the United States and City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami, still very appropriate today even though they were published in 1985 and 1993 respectively, and the more subjective, recent works, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation, of 2001, and Spanish Legacies: The Coming of Age of the Second Generation, from 2016.
Related Topics
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