Princess of Asturias Awards: Who won Spain's answer to the Nobel Prizes this year?
27/10/2021
PERHAPS there's no honour that quite lives up to winning a Nobel Prize, but a small number of them come very close – and Spain's national version, the Princess of Asturias Award, is among these. Earning a prize in the name of the south-western European country's teenage heir to the throne is not just lucrative; the prestige means you instantly go down in global history for what you do best.
They used to be known as the Prince of Asturias Awards, but now there's no such person; the Prince in question became King Felipe VI in summer 2014 after his father, Juan Carlos I, abdicated, and as he and his wife, Queen Letizia, have two daughters, the prizes were instantly renamed.
Back when they were, our Princess of Asturias was only eight years old, but like her dad, presented her namesake awards for the first time when she was 13 and, showing that rare level of maturity which comes with knowing practically from nursery school that you're destined to become reigning monarch one day, Crown Princess Leonor is now taking the whole thing in her stride.
This year, she has flown back home from Wales for half-term to preside over the awards ceremony, having only just this term started at the prestigious United World College of the Atlantic in the Vale of Glamorgan, where she will remain until she finishes her sixth-form studies.
Princess Leonor caught her flight to Cardiff from Madrid airport on the very morning of her first day at a centre where she would be sharing a house and classroom with fellow pupils of different nationalities – and this is deliberate, to encourage integration and understanding – where young European Royals typically rub shoulders with the best teenage brains from third world countries, and where over 60% of students are on partial or full scholarships.
It's an experience of a lifetime, and a first for her little sister, the Infanta Sofía, 14, too – her farewells at Adolfo Suárez-Barajas airport were the most emotional of all, since she would suddenly have to adapt to life without her Leonor being around her 24 hours a day.
Leonor is also expected to still be in Spain on Hallowe'en, which will be her 16th birthday.
Here are this year's Princess of Asturias Awards winners – some of whom you'll already recognise – and what they've done to deserve them.
Arts Award: Marina Abramović
A performing arts legend highly acclaimed for her avant-garde pieces focused on the 'individual's search for freedom', winner of the Golden Lion for best artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale with her show Balkan Baroque, Marina, who was born in what was then Yugoslavia, will be 75 in a month's time and, if she is still acting, dancing, directing and choreographing in 2023, will be celebrating half a century on the world's stage.
She studied at the Fine Arts Academy in her native city, Belgrade, now in Serbia, for five years and then took up her post-graduate studies at the Fine Arts Academy in Zagreb, now in Croatia.
Marina taught performing arts at the Novi Sad Fine Arts Academy for two years, from 1973, then in 1976, moved to Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
It was here that she would meet one of her most famous performance partners, Uwe Laysiepen – stage name Ulay – with whom she filmed what she called her 'big spiritual voyage' in 1988, The Great Wall Walk.
Here, she and Ulay started off at different ends of the Great Wall of China and embraced each other when they met in the middle.
Various fusions of theatre, opera and visual arts that she is well known for include Life and Death of Marina Abramović, in 2011, with Robert Wilson; and Seven Deaths of Maria Callas, an operatic show on the life of the diva herself, in 2020.
Marina's autobiography, Walking Through Walls, was released in 2016.
Communication and Humanities Award: Gloria Steinem
Soaring to fame with her New York Magazine article of 1969, After Black Power, Women's Liberation, Gloria, 87, from Ohio (USA) helped found various female equality organisations including the National Women's Political Caucus, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Women's Action Alliance, the Women and AIDS Fund, and the Women's Media Centre.
A journalist and feminist activist, Gloria has written extensively on labour issues and the rights of minorities, covered key public demonstrations, campaigned in favour of the right to free choice in abortion, equal pay, and for the Equal Rights Amendment.
She also fought publicly against the death penalty, child abuse and female genital mutilation (FGM).
Overall, Gloria is considered to be one of the most iconic figures in the women's rights movements, and was especially active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when inequality was rife across the western world.
Social Sciences Award: Amartya Sen
Sen's research into the causes of famine and human societal development theory, the welfare economy and the underlying mechanisms of poverty has hugely contributed to the battle against injustice, inequality, illness and ignorance.
A week away from his 88th birthday, Amartya, who was born in Santiniketan, India, holds a PhD from Cambridge University (UK) and was professor of economics for many years at the universities of Calcutta, Delhi, Oxford, Harvard, the London School of Economics (LSE), and Trinity College Cambridge where he was dean from 1998 to 2003.
As well as being the founding chancellor of Nalanda University in India, Amartya is currently a professor at Thomas W. Lamont University and teaches economics and philosophy at Harvard, USA.
If you've ever heard say that the world has more than enough food to go around but that the reason millions starve is due to poor and unequal distribution of resources, then you're already aware of the fundamental argument in Amartya Sen's most famous work, Poverty and Famines. An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, from 1981.
He has also advocated the concepts of 'capability and positive freedom', meaning the actual ability of a person to be or do something, as opposed to 'negative freedom', or 'non-interference' – the classic 'not getting involved' which means a person cannot help him- or herself.
It is these theories which led to development plans and policies being directed towards where they are needed in the world, forming the basis for United Nations programmes.
Collective Choice and Social Welfare; The Standard of Living; Development as Freedom; Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny; The Idea of Justice; An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions; and The Country of First Boys are some of Amartya's most ground-breaking essays from 1970 to 2015 which has changed the way global institutions think when tackling poverty and inequality in the third world.
Sports Award: Teresa Perales
If you followed Spain's fortunes at this year's Paralympic Games, you may already be familiar with the name of this super-swimmer, journalist and former politician – Teresa Perales earned the silver in the 50-metres backstroke at Tokyo 2020, which ended two months ago, adding another piece of metalwork to a collection that now totals 27.
Teresa, who will be 46 at the end of December, made her début in para-swimming aged 21, earning a gold and a bronze in the national championships – just two years after becoming paralysed from the waist down due to a severe neuropathy.
Until then, she had been a serious competitor in karate, but her disability at just 19 years old forced her to change course; she graduated in physiotherapy and then trained as a professional sports coach, whilst ploughing her energies outside her studies into honing her swimming.
The Zaragoza-born ex-MP for the regional independent outfit Aragonese Party has been director-general for care policies for the government of Aragón, and advisor for social services and family and for sports and sport promotion at Zaragoza city council.
In European adapted swimming championships, Teresa has won 12 gold medals, 21 silvers and 10 bronzes – 43 overall – and has 22 world championship medals, four of them gold, plus 10 silvers and eight bronzes, as well as breaking five records.
Her first Paralympics were Sydney 2000, and she has since competed in every single one after these, being flag-bearer for Spain at London 2012 and, of her total of 27 medals in 21 years' worth of Games, seven are gold and the remainder equally split between silver and bronze.
She spent eight years as a member of the International Paralympic Committee Athletes' Council, has written two autobiographical books (My Life On Wheels and The Force of a Dream), and earned numerous commemorative and merit awards, including an honorary doctorate from Elche's Miguel Hernández University (Alicante province).
Teresa is, additionally, ambassador for various nationwide foundations focusing on inclusivity, and is a model for Rénault – the face of its sustainable mobility foundation.
Her nomination for a Princess of Asturias Award is in tribute to her being 'an example of succeeding against the odds'.
Letters Award: Emmanuel Carrère
The Paris-born author, scriptwriter and producer was just 24 when he published his first work, a monograph titled Werner Herzog, and 25 when his first novel L'amie du Jaguar ('The Jaguar's Friend') hit the shelves.
A prolific writer, one-time member of the Cannes Film Festival and of Venice Film Festival judges' panel, his novellas have been adapted to screen and, according to John Updike – author of the Rabbit series – Carrère 'leaves you KO in fewer than 150 pages'.
L'Adversaire ('The Adversary'), about the life of murderer Jean-Claude Romand, was published 21 years ago, after which Carrère abandoned his fiction-writing career and embarked on narratives about his own experiences or the real lives of historic personalities, including Un Roman Russe ('A Russian Novel') and D'Autres Vies que la Mienne ('Lives Other Than Mine'), in which he gives a graphic description of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in south-east Asia, which he witnessed first-hand.
As Carrère, now coming up to his 64th birthday, spent two years teaching French in Surabaya, Indonesia, he already knew the area and its people well, decades before the book's publication.
An avid sci-fi reader, he has also written Limónov, Le Royaume ('The Kingdom') – the latter about the birth of Christianity – Je Suis Vivant et Vous Êtes Morts: Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982, on the life of the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was adapted to screen to become the film Blade Runner, plus a collection of his essays and journalism articles as Il Est Avantageux d'Avoir Où Aller ('It's good to have somewhere to go'), and his most recent, Yoga, from 2020.
In addition to four major literary awards from his home country, Carrère was also granted the FIL Literature in the Romance Languages prize from Guadalajara International Book Festival, in México, and the Villa Kujoyama Prize in Kyoto, Japan.
International Cooperation Award: Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED)
Currently, no country in the world has a national law banning girls and women from having an education, which is one of the reasons Afghanistan's population is terrified of what the new Taliban régime will involve – given that, 20 or so years ago, females going to school or college were risking their lives under the same institution for doing so.
It has not always been the case that education for girls was legal worldwide, and culture and society everywhere tends to take a long while to catch up with law: In numerous third-world communities, especially those where even basic schooling costs money, many families consider educating their daughters to be pointless as their future lies in marriage, childbearing and caring for the family.
Girls are far more likely to be pulled out of school at a very early age, or not sent at all, in order to help with the chores – from working the land to collecting water to cooking, food preparing, or looking after younger children.
Ann Cotton founded the Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED) in 1993, and this pan-African movement, run by young nuns who have experienced this social exclusion personally and broken through the barriers, has since given full schooling to 4.8 million girls – boys, too, in families which could not afford to send their sons to class or where there were no facilities available – in several countries.
Children, mostly female, in Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, in particular, have been educated at over 6,700 schools set up by CAMFED, whilst other, small village or community schools were upgraded, equipped and expanded to give more children a chance at learning.
Teaching, as well as 'the three Rs', also focuses on changing attitudes towards women, preparing for the effects of climate change (such as new ways of farming), community economic development, and fairness and social justice.
Girls being taught numeracy and literacy and given the resources to use these to expand their knowledge of the world have a fighting chance of seeking out a career and becoming self-sufficient as adults, which reduces the likelihood of child marriage – where small girls are wedded to much older men to cut down on the number of mouths to feed – and paves the way for freedom of choice.
CAMFED was featured in The New York Times by columnist Nicholas Kristof in his article Choose a gift that changes lives, and each female who benefits from a CAMFED scholarship will later go on to 'coach' and support an average of three young girls to help them carry on with their studies.
Scientific and Technological Research Award: Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman, Philip Felgner, Uğur Şahin, Özlem Türeci, Derrick Rossi and Sarah Gilbert
It was almost inevitable that any award for science, research or both granted at any point in 2021 would have been for those who created a vaccine which has not only, potentially, saved millions of lives and hundreds of millions from becoming very ill, but has allowed society to get back to working, earning money, having fun, and actually seeing each other again. The various vaccine types developed have been about far more than disease prevention; without them, and before them, the damage to the world economy and to the psychological health of its population was becoming untenable.
And what makes these vaccine development projects so incredible is the time they have taken. Normally, such a process would continue on for years, if not decades, but the urgency of a Covid-19 prevention that did not involve shutting everyone indoors and forcing them to stop work meant it took barely 10 months before three different variations were on the shelves.
Despite what much of society fears, the speed involved did not mean the research was 'rushed' or 'cut corners'. It might mean the body of evidence is reduced, but for an emergency situation, scientists felt compelled not to double- and treble-check and replicate and falsify their results ad infinitum; once they had enough sound information to prove safety and some immunity were guaranteed, the formulae were retailed. Later research that hones their findings, such as wiping out immediate side-effects where these are particularly unpleasant, or strengthening their immune responses generated, will continue, of course, and is still under way.
Also, the scientific community literally drew a line under practically all other therapeutic and preventive medical research they had been working on, so they could focus 100% on Covid-19, with many working long, extra, unpaid hours in laboratories; additionally, the extreme urgency of the physical, mental and financial wellbeing of all the world's nations meant governments, charities and many other institutions poured as much cash as they could afford into the vaccine development process to speed it up.
Unfortunately, this has led varying percentages of society to conclude the immunisations were hurried through without proper checks, but now that millions of people of all ages and health conditions have had the jab, are still well despite it, and contagion levels have plummeted with most of those who have been affected largely asymptomatic or only mildly unwell, shows these doubts are unfounded.
In any case, think how long it would take you to pack for a holiday, or clean your house from top to bottom. Now imagine you had to grab the next available flight for a family emergency, or that Royalty, a TV crew or the man or woman of your dreams announced they were popping around later that day. And imagine you suddenly had extra help for either task, or paid time off work to do them. How much more quickly do you think your suitcase would be zipped up or your home spotless? When needs must, and so on. And that's what happened with the vaccines.
Now for the humans behind the prizes.
Philip Felgner is a pioneer in using micro-rays from viral proteins in ascertaining how the immune system responds to infection, and identifying the best antigens for detecting diseases, and in 1985, discovered the technique of 'lipofection', or introducing genetic material in liposomes as a vehicle for RNA-messenger (RNAm) vaccines.
Katalin Karikó expanded on the latter theories and is considered the 'mother of RNA-messenger vaccines'; working alongside Drew Weissman, the pair found that these molecules created a powerful awakening of the immune system, which reacted to them as an 'invader'. This 'awakening' came in the form of severe inflammation, but their joint work enabled them to change RNA structure to prevent this reaction without affecting immunity.
Enter Uğur Şahin, born in Turkey 56 years ago and a medical graduate from the University of Cologne, Germany, and Özlem Türeci, 54, his wife, also Turkish but born in the German town of Lastrup and a medical graduate from the country's Sarre University.
Both researched immunotherapy for cancer for their PhD theses, which has given stage-four patients considerable extra years of life, and quality of life and, in 2008, the couple founded the BioNTech research laboratory which created the first Covid-19 vaccine to hit the shelves, for German pharmaceutical company Pfizer.
Their achievement is not only a milestone for science, but also for expatriate communities everywhere in the world, showing the immense value of foreign-born residents or children of foreign settlers to the country they or their parents chose to live in.
Derrick Rossi used the same RNA-messenger formula to develop the Moderna vaccine, which is much the same as the Pfizer and has been one of the most-used in Europe.
Sarah Gilbert led the multi-national research team at Oxford University, UK, in their development of an adenovirus, or 'dead-virus carrier' immunisation, for the Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, another of the earliest jabs to hit the market and which was in predominant use in Britain for the first few months of 2021.
Concordance Award: José Andrés and World Central Kitchen
Whenever there's a natural or man-made disaster, élite chef José Ramón Andrés Puerta is in the news; not for his gourmet recipes, but because he drops everything to go and feed the 5,000 – or however many victims there are, in fact.
Born in Mieres, Asturias, José Andrés moved to the USA exactly 30 years ago, aged 22, and as well as having since set up over 20 restaurants from coast to coast, featured in numerous media and on TV shows increasing the profile of Spanish cuisine, he eventually turned six of his prestigious eateries in Washington DC and New York into soup kitchens.
Since 2012, he has been running the charity World Central Kitchen – which is currently working with the British Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, on community facilities in rural India – and which is immediately on site to hand out food parcels and hot meals for those who have suffered major and sudden tragedies.
From the government workers left unpaid for months after former US president Donald Trump's shutdown to earthquake victims in Haïti, from those whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed in a mass industrial explosion in Beirut, Lebanon to locals stricken by Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas, José Andrés is there with his portable stoves – literally.
He does not just fund his charity and watch others do the dirty work. When Hurricane Dorian ripped across the Caribbean islands, tearing up everything in its path, José Andrés filmed himself against the backdrop of it minutes after getting off the plane.
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos gave him a multi-million donation for World Central Kitchen this year, and the part of the Princess of Asturias Award allocated to it will fund its crucial work, going forward.
It has now been reported that he will donate the entire prize pot from his own Princess of Asturias Award, the one earned in his own name, to help feed evacuees on the Canarian island of La Palma who have lost everything in the wake of the Cumbre Viejo volcano eruption.
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PERHAPS there's no honour that quite lives up to winning a Nobel Prize, but a small number of them come very close – and Spain's national version, the Princess of Asturias Award, is among these. Earning a prize in the name of the south-western European country's teenage heir to the throne is not just lucrative; the prestige means you instantly go down in global history for what you do best.
They used to be known as the Prince of Asturias Awards, but now there's no such person; the Prince in question became King Felipe VI in summer 2014 after his father, Juan Carlos I, abdicated, and as he and his wife, Queen Letizia, have two daughters, the prizes were instantly renamed.
Back when they were, our Princess of Asturias was only eight years old, but like her dad, presented her namesake awards for the first time when she was 13 and, showing that rare level of maturity which comes with knowing practically from nursery school that you're destined to become reigning monarch one day, Crown Princess Leonor is now taking the whole thing in her stride.
This year, she has flown back home from Wales for half-term to preside over the awards ceremony, having only just this term started at the prestigious United World College of the Atlantic in the Vale of Glamorgan, where she will remain until she finishes her sixth-form studies.
Princess Leonor caught her flight to Cardiff from Madrid airport on the very morning of her first day at a centre where she would be sharing a house and classroom with fellow pupils of different nationalities – and this is deliberate, to encourage integration and understanding – where young European Royals typically rub shoulders with the best teenage brains from third world countries, and where over 60% of students are on partial or full scholarships.
It's an experience of a lifetime, and a first for her little sister, the Infanta Sofía, 14, too – her farewells at Adolfo Suárez-Barajas airport were the most emotional of all, since she would suddenly have to adapt to life without her Leonor being around her 24 hours a day.
Leonor is also expected to still be in Spain on Hallowe'en, which will be her 16th birthday.
Here are this year's Princess of Asturias Awards winners – some of whom you'll already recognise – and what they've done to deserve them.
Arts Award: Marina Abramović
A performing arts legend highly acclaimed for her avant-garde pieces focused on the 'individual's search for freedom', winner of the Golden Lion for best artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale with her show Balkan Baroque, Marina, who was born in what was then Yugoslavia, will be 75 in a month's time and, if she is still acting, dancing, directing and choreographing in 2023, will be celebrating half a century on the world's stage.
She studied at the Fine Arts Academy in her native city, Belgrade, now in Serbia, for five years and then took up her post-graduate studies at the Fine Arts Academy in Zagreb, now in Croatia.
Marina taught performing arts at the Novi Sad Fine Arts Academy for two years, from 1973, then in 1976, moved to Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
It was here that she would meet one of her most famous performance partners, Uwe Laysiepen – stage name Ulay – with whom she filmed what she called her 'big spiritual voyage' in 1988, The Great Wall Walk.
Here, she and Ulay started off at different ends of the Great Wall of China and embraced each other when they met in the middle.
Various fusions of theatre, opera and visual arts that she is well known for include Life and Death of Marina Abramović, in 2011, with Robert Wilson; and Seven Deaths of Maria Callas, an operatic show on the life of the diva herself, in 2020.
Marina's autobiography, Walking Through Walls, was released in 2016.
Communication and Humanities Award: Gloria Steinem
Soaring to fame with her New York Magazine article of 1969, After Black Power, Women's Liberation, Gloria, 87, from Ohio (USA) helped found various female equality organisations including the National Women's Political Caucus, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Women's Action Alliance, the Women and AIDS Fund, and the Women's Media Centre.
A journalist and feminist activist, Gloria has written extensively on labour issues and the rights of minorities, covered key public demonstrations, campaigned in favour of the right to free choice in abortion, equal pay, and for the Equal Rights Amendment.
She also fought publicly against the death penalty, child abuse and female genital mutilation (FGM).
Overall, Gloria is considered to be one of the most iconic figures in the women's rights movements, and was especially active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when inequality was rife across the western world.
Social Sciences Award: Amartya Sen
Sen's research into the causes of famine and human societal development theory, the welfare economy and the underlying mechanisms of poverty has hugely contributed to the battle against injustice, inequality, illness and ignorance.
A week away from his 88th birthday, Amartya, who was born in Santiniketan, India, holds a PhD from Cambridge University (UK) and was professor of economics for many years at the universities of Calcutta, Delhi, Oxford, Harvard, the London School of Economics (LSE), and Trinity College Cambridge where he was dean from 1998 to 2003.
As well as being the founding chancellor of Nalanda University in India, Amartya is currently a professor at Thomas W. Lamont University and teaches economics and philosophy at Harvard, USA.
If you've ever heard say that the world has more than enough food to go around but that the reason millions starve is due to poor and unequal distribution of resources, then you're already aware of the fundamental argument in Amartya Sen's most famous work, Poverty and Famines. An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, from 1981.
He has also advocated the concepts of 'capability and positive freedom', meaning the actual ability of a person to be or do something, as opposed to 'negative freedom', or 'non-interference' – the classic 'not getting involved' which means a person cannot help him- or herself.
It is these theories which led to development plans and policies being directed towards where they are needed in the world, forming the basis for United Nations programmes.
Collective Choice and Social Welfare; The Standard of Living; Development as Freedom; Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny; The Idea of Justice; An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions; and The Country of First Boys are some of Amartya's most ground-breaking essays from 1970 to 2015 which has changed the way global institutions think when tackling poverty and inequality in the third world.
Sports Award: Teresa Perales
If you followed Spain's fortunes at this year's Paralympic Games, you may already be familiar with the name of this super-swimmer, journalist and former politician – Teresa Perales earned the silver in the 50-metres backstroke at Tokyo 2020, which ended two months ago, adding another piece of metalwork to a collection that now totals 27.
Teresa, who will be 46 at the end of December, made her début in para-swimming aged 21, earning a gold and a bronze in the national championships – just two years after becoming paralysed from the waist down due to a severe neuropathy.
Until then, she had been a serious competitor in karate, but her disability at just 19 years old forced her to change course; she graduated in physiotherapy and then trained as a professional sports coach, whilst ploughing her energies outside her studies into honing her swimming.
The Zaragoza-born ex-MP for the regional independent outfit Aragonese Party has been director-general for care policies for the government of Aragón, and advisor for social services and family and for sports and sport promotion at Zaragoza city council.
In European adapted swimming championships, Teresa has won 12 gold medals, 21 silvers and 10 bronzes – 43 overall – and has 22 world championship medals, four of them gold, plus 10 silvers and eight bronzes, as well as breaking five records.
Her first Paralympics were Sydney 2000, and she has since competed in every single one after these, being flag-bearer for Spain at London 2012 and, of her total of 27 medals in 21 years' worth of Games, seven are gold and the remainder equally split between silver and bronze.
She spent eight years as a member of the International Paralympic Committee Athletes' Council, has written two autobiographical books (My Life On Wheels and The Force of a Dream), and earned numerous commemorative and merit awards, including an honorary doctorate from Elche's Miguel Hernández University (Alicante province).
Teresa is, additionally, ambassador for various nationwide foundations focusing on inclusivity, and is a model for Rénault – the face of its sustainable mobility foundation.
Her nomination for a Princess of Asturias Award is in tribute to her being 'an example of succeeding against the odds'.
Letters Award: Emmanuel Carrère
The Paris-born author, scriptwriter and producer was just 24 when he published his first work, a monograph titled Werner Herzog, and 25 when his first novel L'amie du Jaguar ('The Jaguar's Friend') hit the shelves.
A prolific writer, one-time member of the Cannes Film Festival and of Venice Film Festival judges' panel, his novellas have been adapted to screen and, according to John Updike – author of the Rabbit series – Carrère 'leaves you KO in fewer than 150 pages'.
L'Adversaire ('The Adversary'), about the life of murderer Jean-Claude Romand, was published 21 years ago, after which Carrère abandoned his fiction-writing career and embarked on narratives about his own experiences or the real lives of historic personalities, including Un Roman Russe ('A Russian Novel') and D'Autres Vies que la Mienne ('Lives Other Than Mine'), in which he gives a graphic description of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in south-east Asia, which he witnessed first-hand.
As Carrère, now coming up to his 64th birthday, spent two years teaching French in Surabaya, Indonesia, he already knew the area and its people well, decades before the book's publication.
An avid sci-fi reader, he has also written Limónov, Le Royaume ('The Kingdom') – the latter about the birth of Christianity – Je Suis Vivant et Vous Êtes Morts: Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982, on the life of the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was adapted to screen to become the film Blade Runner, plus a collection of his essays and journalism articles as Il Est Avantageux d'Avoir Où Aller ('It's good to have somewhere to go'), and his most recent, Yoga, from 2020.
In addition to four major literary awards from his home country, Carrère was also granted the FIL Literature in the Romance Languages prize from Guadalajara International Book Festival, in México, and the Villa Kujoyama Prize in Kyoto, Japan.
International Cooperation Award: Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED)
Currently, no country in the world has a national law banning girls and women from having an education, which is one of the reasons Afghanistan's population is terrified of what the new Taliban régime will involve – given that, 20 or so years ago, females going to school or college were risking their lives under the same institution for doing so.
It has not always been the case that education for girls was legal worldwide, and culture and society everywhere tends to take a long while to catch up with law: In numerous third-world communities, especially those where even basic schooling costs money, many families consider educating their daughters to be pointless as their future lies in marriage, childbearing and caring for the family.
Girls are far more likely to be pulled out of school at a very early age, or not sent at all, in order to help with the chores – from working the land to collecting water to cooking, food preparing, or looking after younger children.
Ann Cotton founded the Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED) in 1993, and this pan-African movement, run by young nuns who have experienced this social exclusion personally and broken through the barriers, has since given full schooling to 4.8 million girls – boys, too, in families which could not afford to send their sons to class or where there were no facilities available – in several countries.
Children, mostly female, in Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, in particular, have been educated at over 6,700 schools set up by CAMFED, whilst other, small village or community schools were upgraded, equipped and expanded to give more children a chance at learning.
Teaching, as well as 'the three Rs', also focuses on changing attitudes towards women, preparing for the effects of climate change (such as new ways of farming), community economic development, and fairness and social justice.
Girls being taught numeracy and literacy and given the resources to use these to expand their knowledge of the world have a fighting chance of seeking out a career and becoming self-sufficient as adults, which reduces the likelihood of child marriage – where small girls are wedded to much older men to cut down on the number of mouths to feed – and paves the way for freedom of choice.
CAMFED was featured in The New York Times by columnist Nicholas Kristof in his article Choose a gift that changes lives, and each female who benefits from a CAMFED scholarship will later go on to 'coach' and support an average of three young girls to help them carry on with their studies.
Scientific and Technological Research Award: Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman, Philip Felgner, Uğur Şahin, Özlem Türeci, Derrick Rossi and Sarah Gilbert
It was almost inevitable that any award for science, research or both granted at any point in 2021 would have been for those who created a vaccine which has not only, potentially, saved millions of lives and hundreds of millions from becoming very ill, but has allowed society to get back to working, earning money, having fun, and actually seeing each other again. The various vaccine types developed have been about far more than disease prevention; without them, and before them, the damage to the world economy and to the psychological health of its population was becoming untenable.
And what makes these vaccine development projects so incredible is the time they have taken. Normally, such a process would continue on for years, if not decades, but the urgency of a Covid-19 prevention that did not involve shutting everyone indoors and forcing them to stop work meant it took barely 10 months before three different variations were on the shelves.
Despite what much of society fears, the speed involved did not mean the research was 'rushed' or 'cut corners'. It might mean the body of evidence is reduced, but for an emergency situation, scientists felt compelled not to double- and treble-check and replicate and falsify their results ad infinitum; once they had enough sound information to prove safety and some immunity were guaranteed, the formulae were retailed. Later research that hones their findings, such as wiping out immediate side-effects where these are particularly unpleasant, or strengthening their immune responses generated, will continue, of course, and is still under way.
Also, the scientific community literally drew a line under practically all other therapeutic and preventive medical research they had been working on, so they could focus 100% on Covid-19, with many working long, extra, unpaid hours in laboratories; additionally, the extreme urgency of the physical, mental and financial wellbeing of all the world's nations meant governments, charities and many other institutions poured as much cash as they could afford into the vaccine development process to speed it up.
Unfortunately, this has led varying percentages of society to conclude the immunisations were hurried through without proper checks, but now that millions of people of all ages and health conditions have had the jab, are still well despite it, and contagion levels have plummeted with most of those who have been affected largely asymptomatic or only mildly unwell, shows these doubts are unfounded.
In any case, think how long it would take you to pack for a holiday, or clean your house from top to bottom. Now imagine you had to grab the next available flight for a family emergency, or that Royalty, a TV crew or the man or woman of your dreams announced they were popping around later that day. And imagine you suddenly had extra help for either task, or paid time off work to do them. How much more quickly do you think your suitcase would be zipped up or your home spotless? When needs must, and so on. And that's what happened with the vaccines.
Now for the humans behind the prizes.
Philip Felgner is a pioneer in using micro-rays from viral proteins in ascertaining how the immune system responds to infection, and identifying the best antigens for detecting diseases, and in 1985, discovered the technique of 'lipofection', or introducing genetic material in liposomes as a vehicle for RNA-messenger (RNAm) vaccines.
Katalin Karikó expanded on the latter theories and is considered the 'mother of RNA-messenger vaccines'; working alongside Drew Weissman, the pair found that these molecules created a powerful awakening of the immune system, which reacted to them as an 'invader'. This 'awakening' came in the form of severe inflammation, but their joint work enabled them to change RNA structure to prevent this reaction without affecting immunity.
Enter Uğur Şahin, born in Turkey 56 years ago and a medical graduate from the University of Cologne, Germany, and Özlem Türeci, 54, his wife, also Turkish but born in the German town of Lastrup and a medical graduate from the country's Sarre University.
Both researched immunotherapy for cancer for their PhD theses, which has given stage-four patients considerable extra years of life, and quality of life and, in 2008, the couple founded the BioNTech research laboratory which created the first Covid-19 vaccine to hit the shelves, for German pharmaceutical company Pfizer.
Their achievement is not only a milestone for science, but also for expatriate communities everywhere in the world, showing the immense value of foreign-born residents or children of foreign settlers to the country they or their parents chose to live in.
Derrick Rossi used the same RNA-messenger formula to develop the Moderna vaccine, which is much the same as the Pfizer and has been one of the most-used in Europe.
Sarah Gilbert led the multi-national research team at Oxford University, UK, in their development of an adenovirus, or 'dead-virus carrier' immunisation, for the Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, another of the earliest jabs to hit the market and which was in predominant use in Britain for the first few months of 2021.
Concordance Award: José Andrés and World Central Kitchen
Whenever there's a natural or man-made disaster, élite chef José Ramón Andrés Puerta is in the news; not for his gourmet recipes, but because he drops everything to go and feed the 5,000 – or however many victims there are, in fact.
Born in Mieres, Asturias, José Andrés moved to the USA exactly 30 years ago, aged 22, and as well as having since set up over 20 restaurants from coast to coast, featured in numerous media and on TV shows increasing the profile of Spanish cuisine, he eventually turned six of his prestigious eateries in Washington DC and New York into soup kitchens.
Since 2012, he has been running the charity World Central Kitchen – which is currently working with the British Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, on community facilities in rural India – and which is immediately on site to hand out food parcels and hot meals for those who have suffered major and sudden tragedies.
From the government workers left unpaid for months after former US president Donald Trump's shutdown to earthquake victims in Haïti, from those whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed in a mass industrial explosion in Beirut, Lebanon to locals stricken by Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas, José Andrés is there with his portable stoves – literally.
He does not just fund his charity and watch others do the dirty work. When Hurricane Dorian ripped across the Caribbean islands, tearing up everything in its path, José Andrés filmed himself against the backdrop of it minutes after getting off the plane.
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos gave him a multi-million donation for World Central Kitchen this year, and the part of the Princess of Asturias Award allocated to it will fund its crucial work, going forward.
It has now been reported that he will donate the entire prize pot from his own Princess of Asturias Award, the one earned in his own name, to help feed evacuees on the Canarian island of La Palma who have lost everything in the wake of the Cumbre Viejo volcano eruption.