On the afternoon of Saturday, November 11, which coincided with Bookstore Day, Ms. Letizia wore a fuchsia knit sweater and matching leather jacket to attend a literary event at El Corte Inglés in Callao, central Madrid. When he arrived at the department store, he went to the library floor and, like the others present, stood in line so that the journalist and writer Sonsoles Ónega could sign a copy of “Las hijas de la criada, Planeta de Novela 2023” The surprise appearance of the Queen It didn’t take long for it to go viral. The interpretation of the gesture seemed pretty clear. I was there not only to support an author, but also to support a friend and former colleague who had received harsh criticism the day before in Babelia, the cultural supplement of EL PAÍS. “My dear Let, the one you screwed up,” Ónega wrote in his dedication.
“There are no statements from the company,” they reply from Planeta after being asked by this newspaper about the impact that the royal support had on the promotion of the novel by Ónega, who was a witness at the wedding of Don Felipe Doña Letizia . The editor’s silence is filled by others. Many have praised the gesture and others – some – have criticized it. “Even if you are queen, can you go to El Corte Inglés to promote your friend’s book that you know will go viral and that everyone will pick it up? “Actually, we’re all paying for this promo,” Bob Pop said a few days ago at Hoy por Hoy. “What will make Babelia’s criticism and the image of the queen supporting her friend sell or not sell more books?” said the comedian and writer during his weekly intervention at Cadena Ser.
More information
Doña Letizia’s allusion to the winner of the last Planeta Prize – reproduced and analyzed ad nauseam in newspapers, on television and in gossip magazines – has once again highlighted the power of the Queen as a literary author. Vanity Fair magazine dedicates the cover of its December-January issue to his growing influence in the cultural world, receiving praise from figures such as Ida Vitale, Elvira Lindo and Luis García Montero. “He is a cultured person,” said the director of the Cervantes Institute. Letizia’s coronation as Queen of Culture is the culmination of a personal project that began long before her meeting Felipe de Borbón and her entry into the Spanish royal family. Letizia Ortiz began cultivating her passion for literature and culture as a child, living in a more industrial than residential area of Oviedo, closer to a blacksmith shop and a long-distance bus station than a library or museum.
Sonsoles Ónega signs a copy of her book “The Maid’s Daughters” for Queen Letizia in Madrid on November 11.EFE/Editorial Planeta
As a child, she admired her father, journalist Jesús Ortiz’s love of writing. When she attended La Gesta public school as a 13-year-old teenager, she achieved good grades in language and literature. In the afternoon, he ate a snack and did his homework at the train station, where his paternal grandmother, the popular announcer and actress María del Carmen Álvarez del Valle, worked. Grandma Menchu, as she called her, wrote aphorisms, essays and read poetry. It was one of his first cultural influences. The speaker also encouraged her to take her first steps in journalism. The young Letizia later hosted the radio show El Columpio, in which she spoke to an audience of children. Her father, who as a young man had dreamed of studying philosophy and literature, helped her write the scripts.
When he was 15 years old, his family moved to Madrid for his father’s work reasons. Farewell to Oviedo opened up new horizons for him. Doña Letizia continued her studies at the Ramiro de Maeztu Institute, where she completed high school. There he met Professor Alonso Guerrero, who taught Spanish literature. During free periods, teachers and students met in the school cafeteria to talk about books. “I talked to her a lot about literature,” Guerrero explained to Leonardo Faccio in Letizia, the Impatient Queen (debate). After nine years of dating and one year of marriage, Guerrero and Doña Letizia have never stopped seeing each other. As he told Faccio, the queen avoids journalists from time to time and meets in cafes to talk to him.
Doña Letizia also distinguished herself during her journalism studies at the Faculty of Information Sciences. “She wanted to know,” recalls Fermín Bouza, her professor of public opinion at the Complutense University of Madrid. “I walked between books, I didn’t read them all, but I quoted them. The enlightened world touched them. It is the world that he values most,” revealed the sociologist and writer Faccio. Between 1992 and 1993, the young journalist completed an internship at the newspaper La Nueva España in Oviedo, focusing primarily on television and entertainment. Her editors remember her as a tenacious professional who quoted philosophers in the local news. He might mention Seneca’s diatribes against hedonism or Nero’s gastronomic orgies in a note about the decline in ice cream sales. He soon signed a book review called “The Compass.” At 21, Letizia Ortiz was already telling Spaniards what they should read.
During his doctoral studies in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he wrote a dissertation on the press and power, he published an essay about the extensive interview. He called it Winks upon Winks upon Winks, an essay inspired by the work of American anthropologist Clifford Geertz that impressed his professors. He also got a job at the newspaper Siglo 21, where he wrote brilliant pieces for the entertainment supplement Tentaciones. As Leonardo Faccio recounts in Letizia, the Impatient Queen, the journalist Benito Pérez quoted Galdós to recommend a bar that, in her opinion, had “greater importance in politics than a ministry,” or she called García Márquez to ask about Speaking of another bar, its cocktails deserve to be drunk in a “good conversation”. She was so prolific that she had to adopt the pseudonym Ada in order to publish everything she wrote.
When news of her engagement to Felipe de Borbón broke in November 2003, the journalist’s father, Jesús Ortiz, made a short statement on the television program Salsa Rosa. “My daughter loves culture, literature, she is an avid reader,” he said of the future queen on prime time. A few days later, Letizia herself confirmed this in the marriage proposal and gave the prince a copy of El doncel de don Enrique el doliente from 1850 by Mariano José de Larra. “It’s a 15th-century chivalry story, a book I wanted for him,” she explained, somewhat shyly, in front of hundreds of cameras and reporters. The work became a bestseller.
The then Princess of Asturias, on the XXXVII. Children’s and Young People’s Book Fair in Madrid, December 2013.Javier Lizon (EFE / Cordon Press)
David Rocasolano, cousin of the queen, believes it is “a myth of the lackey press” that Doña Letizia is a voracious reader. “My cousin never read anything other than newspapers, a Grisham-style bestseller, or the books she was required to read in school and college (…) When Letizia, a journalist, gave her fiancé a selection of Larra’s exquisite articles would have behaved coherently. But giving away an insignificant, literally expendable and unforgettable work by the most influential chronicler in the history of Spain seems to me to be an insult to Larra and the entire caste of journalists. They should have been given better advice,” Rocasolano said in his 2013 book “Goodbye, Princess (Akal).” The cousins haven’t spoken in more than a decade.
But as Anna Caballé, author of Feminism in Spain, told Leonardo Faccio, “educated women in Spain have been stigmatized in thousands of ways by popular culture.” The writer and literary critic doesn’t like the word “prescriber” because she believes that it has an imposing connotation that she deeply dislikes, but she has no doubts about the Queen’s genuine cultural concerns and the influence she exerts on the ordinary Spanish people. “I love the interest he shows in culture and how he practices it in a transversal way, crossing different registers,” explains Caballé in conversation with EL PAÍS. “His charisma is undeniable, but as I said, I like that he exerts it naturally, without forcing himself. I have always missed a greater integration of the Spanish elites and of course the political class into the culture. “It was Ortega’s workhorse,” he continues.
Queen Letizia opens the Madrid Book Fair 2022. Álvaro García
Reality or mirage, Doña Letizia’s power in culture is visible. Your visit to the Madrid Book Fair is one of the most anticipated events for booksellers and publishers. “Thanks to this, the fair appears in the media where it would otherwise not appear. It would be difficult for us to reach the tabloids or certain programs with our resources,” Eva Orúe, director of the fair, told Vanity Fair. In 2015, the Queen recorded “Fossil Angels” by Alan Moore about the heroes of the occult society Golden Dawn. Your satanic majesty? was the title of this newspaper in a chronicle that went viral. This year she became interested in the “Queens Consorts” collection, which focuses on the lives of the wives of medieval monarchs, and bought “The Use of the Photo” by Annie Ernaux; The City of God by Pier Paolo Pasolini; and, among others, the literary essays of HP Lovecraft. She also stopped by the stand of the Mary Read bookstore, which specializes in LGBTBI and transfeminism, where she bought the “anti-marriage” book “The End of the Love Novel” by Vivian Gornick. The New Yorker author, a key figure in second-wave feminism, argues that the world has changed and that love and marriage have “ceased to be metaphors that adequately represent happiness and personal fulfillment.” While paying with a 50 euro note, the queen admitted to booksellers that she knew the author and had already read “Fierce Attachments” (1987), a story in which a young Gornick explores the complex relationship with her mother tells and is torn between the two models of women that she would like to embody and that will determine her relationships with men, with work and with other women.
No one knows better than Doña Letizia what it can cost a woman to find her place in the world. Since joining the Spanish royal family 20 years ago, he has had to deal with many prejudices. Being divorced, working class, educated, and having their own opinions and intellectual concerns tested the conventions of the monarchy and Spanish society. However, Anna Caballé believes that all these prejudices have already been “left far behind”. “We ignored everything about his personality. Now things are different and she has found the way or ways to make herself known,” concludes the literary critic. You will recognize her by the books she reads.