Carmen Domingo has been recognized with the Comillas Prize for History, Biography and Memoirs for her book Loneliness was the price where it tells the story of Carmen Díez de Rivera (1942-1999), a key figure in the Spanish Transition. This was announced this Friday morning by the jury composed of Miguel Ángel Aguilar, Jordi Amat, Isabel Burdiel, Mercedes Cabrera and Josep Maria Ventosa (representing Tusquets Editores).
The award-winning biography reviews the life of Díez de Rivera, daughter of an aristocratic family linked to Francoism who evolved towards progressive positions, taking a leading role on the path to democracy from the different positions she held on the political scene of the 70s.
To write his text, Domingo gathered valuable information from documentary sources and conversations with friends and personalities who had a relationship with Díez. In the statement announcing the award they argue that “the author thoroughly exposes the exciting work in the shadows of a woman who led the Cabinet of Adolfo Suárez and was an almost daily confidant of King Juan Carlos I at crucial moments.” The biography also reviews unpublished aspects of her life, the way in which she “wove alliances and consensus” in the years of the Transition or her work as a European parliamentarian in Brussels in her final years.
The jurors have dedicated words of recognition to the work. Mercedes Cabrera assures that it is “a biography that recovers with a new look, from today, what was said and written at the time about who was called ‘muse’ of the transition, an appellation that hid a firm, personally hard, continuous and committed political work.” Isabel Burdiel believes that it is a biography that “refreshes, based on the life and political experience of an exceptional woman, what we know about the shared and almost ‘miraculous’ effort that made the Transition possible.” Jordi Amat recognizes in Díez a “free woman, trained in the elite of Francoism and with the ability to dialogue with the men who led the change,” in addition to valuing Domingo’s work as “fascinating,” where “the life of Carmen Díez de Rivera is finally told in detail.”
The award-winning Carmen Domingo (Barcelona, 1970), in addition to being a writer, is a philologist and playwright, with a work committed to feminism that combines essay, biography, novel and theater. Throughout her career she has dedicated herself to studying and disseminating the history and experience of women in Spain. Other of his works are My dear daughter Hildegart (2008) or the play They are only women (2015). In 2022 she was recognized with the Good Journalism Practices Award from the Associació de Dones Periodistes.
In the previous edition of the Comillas Award, the winner was José Teruel with Carmen Martín Gaite. A biography. In 2024, Manuel Calderón was recognized for Until the last breathand in 2023 to Ian Gibson for A Carmen in Granada. Memoirs of a Dubliner.