Princess of Asturias Award winners: Meryl Streep, Mary's Meals, Haruki Marukami...

A HOLLYWOOD legend joining folk-dancers from Asturias and showing off her fancy footwork in the street is not a scene your average Oviedo resident witnesses during his or her weekly shop. Even though their northern-Spanish city is the birthplace of a Formula 1 icon (that's you, Fernando Alonso), meaning it already boasts celebrity credentials, the image of Meryl Streep having a crack at the gaitas is one the locals will not be able to get out of their heads for a while.

But they were not hallucinating: The actress with the most Oscar and Golden Globe nominations in cinema history was, indeed, outside the old La Vega arms factory in Asturias' regional capital, joining in with the traditional local dance as the marching band El Gumial played its Celtic-based folk music.

Meryl, 74, radiant in red and black trousers and a black jacket with her pale blonde locks flowing long and loose, engaged, smiling, with the public, waving and blowing kisses, as she headed to the La Vega building for the annual Princess of Asturias Awards Ceremony.

The Mamma Mia, Out of Africa and The Devil Wears Prada actress was looking forward to picking up a trophy from Spain's future queen, Leonor – the Princess of Asturias herself – who, just days short of her 18^th birthday on Hallowe'en, would be presenting her namesake awards.

On a short leave from her Armed Forces training in Zaragoza, no doubt Princess Leonor was looking forward to meeting the silver-screen queen every bit as much as Meryl was to getting her prize from the teen Royal.

What are the Princess of Asturias Awards?

Often considered Spain's national answer to the Nobel Prizes, what used to be the Prince of Asturias Awards (until said Prince became King Felipe VI, in 2014) gives winners a certificate, a trophy-sized sculpture by the late, great surrealist artist Joan Miró, a badge, and €50,000 in cash.

Many of the prize categories are for crucial work carried out by charities and scientific researchers, meaning the award money helps to finance their valuable projects; indeed, some organisations have won a Prince or Princess of Asturias multiple times – not just in recognition of their efforts, but as a way of helping to fund them.

Here's the lowdown on the 2023 winners – starting, of course, with Meryl.

Arts

Born Mary Louise Streep in Summit, USA, taking singing classes from age 12 and graduating from Vassar College and then from Yale Drama School in performing arts, the three-times Oscar winner began her career by treading the boards – her first notable rôle was a Broadway production of Anton Chekov's The Cherry Orchard when she was 28.

Over the next 46 years, Meryl Streep would go on to win eight Golden Globes, three Emmy Awards and two BAFTAs, as well as her Oscars, and holds the record for the most-nominated in these (21 times) and in the Golden Globes (32 times).

Meryl's first Oscar and first Golden Globe were both for Best Supporting Actress in Kramer vs Kramer, in 1979, but what felt like the culmination of her success after three decades of life turned out to be just the beginning.

She is the only living actress with more than two Oscars – the others being for Sophie's Choice (1982) and the biographical epic about the UK's first-ever female prime minister, The Iron Lady (2011), in which Meryl played Margaret Thatcher herself.

Although Ms Streep's filmography list is seemingly endless, her most-acclaimed works include rôles in literary adaptations such as John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ironweed, Evil Angels, Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County, Michael Cunningham's The Hours (a modern rewrite of Virginia Woolf's novel of the same name), Lauren Weisenberger's The Devil Wears Prada, Karen Blixen's Out of Africa, Marvin's Room, The Doubt, Florence Foster Jenkins, The Post, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Let Them All Talk, the Abba musical film Mamma Mia!, and her most recent, Don't Look Up, from 2021.

As well as an actress, Meryl Streep is a philanthropist and fierce defender of women's rights and gender equality, and the Princess of Asturias Arts Award 2023 is the second such distinction she has received in Spain: Along with numerous other, similar decorations, she took the Donostia Prize for lifetime achievement at San Sebastián Film Festival in 2008.

Letters

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, known for his hefty tomes with intriguing titles (Kafka on the Shore; Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; South of the Border, West of the Sun; Dance Dance Dance, among numerous others), counts among his literary inspirations his fellow Prince(ss) of Asturias Award winner Mario Vargas Llosa. Along with the prolific Peruvian author, who took the prestigious prize in 1986, Murakami, 74, is a lifelong fan of the romain noir – dark crime novels – and of Charles Dickens, Truman Capote and Fyodor Dostoyevski, although his style is a blend of science fiction and magical realism with a sizeable dose of the downright surreal.

A literature graduate from Waseda University and a former jazz club owner, the Kyoto-born cult writer's works have been translated into over 40 languages.

He has lived in the USA since 1991 – four years before publishing his bestseller The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles – where he has worked as professor at Princeton and Taft Universities, as well as translating the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, J. D. Salinger, John Irving, and his inspirational writer Capote, of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's fame.

Sports

The Princess of Asturias Awards are decided over nearly a year, meaning the Spanish women's national football team's huge achievement this August – winning what would be only the second FIFA World Cup in Spain's sporting history – would have come too late for them to be considered for nomination. But Eliud Kipchoge's own incredible feats in the industry make him a well-deserved winner for 2023.

Described as the best marathon-runner of all time, Eliud – who will turn 30 next month – has made the podium 11 times in the world's top four major competitions.

They include the London Marathon, which he won four times in five years (from 2015 to 2019, except in 2017), the Berlin Marathon five times, including this and last year, the Tokyo Marathon last year, and the Chicago marathon in 2014.

Kipchoge, from Nandi County in Kenya, has won 16 of his last 19 marathons and is the current world record holder after completing Berlin in two hours, one minute and nine seconds in 2022.

Defending Olympic champion, with golds from Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, he is the only person on earth ever to have completed a marathon – being 26 miles, or 42.2 kilometres – in under two hours (one hour, 59 minutes and 40 seconds, in Vienna, Austria), but this feat was not counted as 'official' for world record purposes due to technicalities.

Kipchoge's eponymous charitable foundation works for the environment, and to guarantee access to education for children worldwide.

He currently competes with NN Running Team in The Netherlands.

Concordance 

Asturias' scenery is often compared to that of Scotland – very green, unspoilt, with rugged coastlines – and both regions share Celtic roots; they are now united by a major award.

Mary's Meals, a non-profit organisation based in the Scottish town of Dalmally, was founded in 2002 by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, although it has its roots in the conflict in Bosnia 10 years earlier when Magnus and his brother Fergus were desperate to help the victims. They arranged for a huge collection of food and other essentials, which they, personally, took to the former Yugoslav nation.

When aid continued to arrive after their delivery, the brothers formed the charity Scottish International Relief (SIR) to carry on channelling donations to the Balkans.

Magnus re-founded SIR in 2002 to serve up meals to children in famine-stricken Malawi, and now operates in 18 countries.

Mary's Meals now feeds well over 2.4 million children daily, and members pay €22 (£20) annually, which is enough to give a full meal to one child every day of the school year.

To get fed, the children have to go to school – a tactic Mary's Meals employs to promote education in the countries it covers – and all schools which benefit from the charity's work are required to provide this education free of charge.

Each child has their own dinner plate, which prevents the spread of undetected infections, and is also associated with their school, so it acts as proof that they have been to class that day.

Mary's Meals uses local produce as much as possible, which gives an economic boost to the farming community, and fortifies them with essential vitamins and minerals to ensure all children get at least the minimum nutritional intake.

As well as Malawi, which makes up nearly half the number of school children fed, Mary's Meals works permanently in Kenya, Liberia, South Sudan, Thailand, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Syria, Yemen, Niger, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Benin, Myanmar, India, Ecuador, Haïti, and Madagascar, and has carried out one-off aid projects following mass refugee exodus situations – in Kenya and South Sudan in 2014 and in Aleppo, Syria, from 2017 – and in the aftermath of natural disasters, such as the Haïti earthquake of 2010 and the typhoon in The Philippines in 2011.

Science and Technology

'Gut bacteria' is a permanent trending topic and 21st-century buzzword (or two buzzwords) in human health and wellbeing, although the full extent of how crucial the concept is to the mind and body is still waiting to be discovered. Biologists and nutritional experts are continuing to tap into the potential of this new knowledge, aiming to unveil more of the massive iceberg whose tip is never far from search engines.

Three scientists from the USA are credited with exposing said tip, and now share the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award in their field.

Biochemistry graduate Bonnie L. Bassler, 62, from Chicago; E. Peter Greenberg, from New York, who will be 75 next month, and fellow biology graduate Jeffrey Gordon, 76, from New Orléans have made huge waves in research into intestinal bacteria and its impact on the human organism.

Gordon has been a pioneer in human microbiome studies, discovering that the large intestine is home to tens of trillions of bacteria – multiple times the number of all other cells in our bodies – and how they affect not only digestive and metabolic conditions such as diabetes, malnutrition and obesity, but also neurological development and the immune system. It is said that the human gut is responsible for creating more neurotransmitters – chemicals that pass messages between neurons to enable the mind and body to function – than any other part of the organism.

To date, Jeffrey Gordon's Human Microbiome Project has managed to identify around 10,000 species of gut bacteria and sequence the DNA of more than 100 of them.

He is also the 'father' of the rather yucky-sounding, but often life-saving, faeces transplants now being carried out in extreme cases where gut bacteria has been wiped out.

Bonnie L. Bassler and E. Peter Greenberg are pioneers in studying the communication between these bacteria, which happens by releasing certain substances, and their 'group behaviour' – how they affect health when working in clusters or in isolation, a process Greenberg dubbed 'quorum sensing'.

Working separately, they found that each species of bacteria has its own 'language', or individual molecule which, when secreted, is only 'understood' by others in their species, acting as a summons for them to group together into a community, or quorum, in order to work in regulating the expression of given genes.

Bacteria community behaviour is key to ascertaining how the body responds to real or perceived infection, and its research could unlock solutions to antibiotic-resistant virii, poor immune systems, or autoimmune conditions where germ-fighting cells mobilise against a non-existent virus and cause chronic or repeated health problems for the host (human, that is).

International Cooperation

Developing medication to treat 'forgotten' or rare serious health conditions, especially those directly related to environments of extreme poverty, acquiring sponsorship deals to fund their research and working with pharmaceutical companies to guarantee prices are kept as low as possible, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) was founded jointly by seven key organisations – among them charities, public institutions and private entities.

Doctors Without Borders, the Medical Research Council of India, the Medical Research Institute of Kenya, Malaysia's ministry of health, Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), L'Institut Pasteur in France, and the World Health Organisation's (WHO's) Special Research and Training Programme for Neglected Diseases launched the scheme together 20 years ago, and now has eight global branches in addition to its head office.

The programme, chaired by Marie-Paule Kieny and run by managing director Luis Pizarro, is now a third-time Princess of Asturias Award winner – DNDi took the Concordance Prize in 2017, and first won the International Cooperation Prize in 2009, when the panel was known as the Prince of Asturias Awards.

Funding comes entirely from public and private donations – among sponsors and financing bodies, and in addition to three Princess of Asturias Awards, cash has come from the fellow International Cooperation Award winners The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the CaixaBank Foundation, and the Carlos Slim Foundation. 

According to DNDi, as many as one in five people worldwide suffer from at least one 'neglected disease', and half a billion of these are children.

Their 'neglect' usually comes from being rare conditions, where developing effective treatment is not financially viable for pharmaceutical giants, or from being mainly third-world related, where governments cannot afford to fund research into drugs.

Conditions the DNDi has worked on medication for include wider-known infections, such as adult and child HIV, dengue, malaria, Hepatitis C, and Covid, as well as those less seen in the developed world such as Chagas Disease, visceral and cutaneous leishmaniasis, 'river blindness' or filaria, mycetoma, sleeping sickness, and cryptococcal meningitis. 

Social Sciences

This year's Princess of Asturias Award winner is credited with having made 'probably the most substantial contribution' towards 'understanding Russia and the USSR' in the past few decades, from an historical and sociological as well as political angle, which encompass 'one of the most essential topics in the comprehension of the modern world'. 

A Member of European Parliament (MEP) who specialised in EU-Russian relations, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse – née Hélène Zourabichvili - was born in Paris in July 1929 to a German-Russian mother and Georgian father, both of aristocratic extraction, first-generation immigrants in France.

Hélène, sadly, did not live to attend the awards ceremony, although she knew she was a winner before she passed away in August this year, just a month after her 94^th birthday.

Growing up, Hélène was taught about Russian history and literature, and was fluent in the Russian language, although she took French nationality before graduating from Paris' Institut d'Études Politiques-SciencePo with a political science degree in 1952.

She completed a PhD in History in 1963, with a thesis on the central Asian revolution, and another PhD, in Humanities, in 1976, researching the Bolshevist movement.

Her work predicted the break-up of the USSR a decade before it happened, leading to her receiving an award in France, and she has won countless other prizes for her biographies of key figures in Russian history including Nikolai II, Alexander II, Catherine II, and the Romanovs.

Dr Carrère d'Encausse returned to her alma mater, SciencePo, in 1969, as professor and researcher, heading up the International Research Centre and the Faculty of Soviet Studies.

She was also a professor at Université Paris 1, at the European College in Bruges, Belgium, and a visiting lecturer at universities across France.

Hélène retired from her rôle as MEP in 1999, aged 70, and was the first woman to be elected as Perpetual Secretary of the Academie Française in the same year, having been a member by invitation since 1990.

Communication and Humanities

Philosopher, author and expert in literary theory, the 2023 winner in the category covering achievements in the humanities and media was held to be one of the world's greatest connoisseurs of Renaissance literature and thought, and an international guru on the Neapolitan humanist Giordano Bruno.

Another winner who found out about his pending award but did not live to see the ceremony in Oviedo, Nuccio Ordine passed away in his native Italy in June, just a month before his 65^th birthday, after suffering a stroke.

Having graduated from Calabria University in modern literature aged 24, Nuccio earned his PhD in Literary Science, Rhetoric and Interpretation Techniques at just 29 years old, paving the way for a career as professor of Italian literature and humanist studies.

He was a frequent guest lecturer at Harvard, Yale, the University of New York, the Warburg Institute in London, Berlin's Max Planck Society, as well as faculties in France and Germany.

Although the 'seat' of the Renaissance was Italy, this cultural revolution is one of Europe's and Italy's most international and most-studied periods after the Roman Empire, its impact spreading far beyond Nuccio's homeland. Its roots were in a revival of Classical thinking, a rediscovery of art, architecture, philosophy, religion and political values of Ancient Rome and Greece, leading to a 'cultural civilisation' of Italy and Europe. It was the era of Shakespeare in the UK, of Miguel Cervantes and the picaresque novel in Spain, the Lutherist reform in northern Europe, and the proliferation of some of the most valuable works of art in history – wealthy ruling courts would spend a fortune on commissioned works and on architectural splendour as a visible sign of their power and status.

'Humanists' were the Renaissance-era Classical thinkers, who churned out essays and treatises throughout the 15^th and 16^th centuries that changed society's views. They also highlighted what one of Dr Ordine's publications called 'the usefulness of the useless': Art for art's sake, or learning and education for pure curiosity and thirst for knowledge rather than for practical skills; the argument of the humanists was that a broad cultural education would promote critical thinking and allow the workforce of tomorrow to navigate the labour market and business environment from a social and analytical perspective.

Nuccio Ordine passionately shared this view, being something of a modern-day humanist himself – after all, the philosophies of the Renaissance, whilst based upon Ancient values, have long been held to have been ahead of their time, given their relevance to today's world.

Dr Ordine held honorary degrees from seven universities, three of them in Brazil, and was a regular contributor for national daily Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.

Nuccio's last-ever book, Men Are Not Islands: The Classics Help Us Live has only just been published in Spain this year.