Olivia de Miguel Crespo and Pablo Martín Sánchez Win Spain's 2026 National Translation Prizes

Spain's Ministry of Culture has awarded its 2026 National Prize for a Translator's Body of Work to Olivia de Miguel Crespo and its 2026 National Prize for Best Translation to Pablo Martín Sánchez for his rendering of Georges Perec's 'Lugares' (Anagrama). Each prize carries €30,000. The jury praised de Miguel for the aesthetic fidelity and linguistic sensitivity with which she captures the original's rhythm and tonal nuance, citing her work on Marianne Moore, Virginia Woolf, G.K. Chesterton and George Orwell, and calling her 'a true institution of the profession' and 'a teacher of translators.' Martín Sánchez was honored for the quality, creativity and ingenuity with which he overcame the difficulties of a hugely complex, unfinished text, whose recurring structure demanded constant cross-checking of fragments across 800 pages; the jury also noted his preservation of the original's critical apparatus and his neologisms in recreating Oulipian wordplay. Born in Logroño in 1948, de Miguel teaches at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, holds a doctorate from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and won the 2011 National Prize for Best Translation for Moore's 'Poesía Completa.' Martín Sánchez, born in Reus in 1977, is an Oulipo member and won the 2022 Ángel Crespo prize for translating Hervé Le Tellier's 'La anomalía.' María José Gálvez Salvador chaired both juries.