During its session on 22 November 2012, the Academy of Language elected, to occupy the place left vacant by the death of Eliseo Álvarez Arenas in September 2011, our colleague Miguel Sáenz, who takes his place in ‘seat B’.

Sáenz is inconstestably an emblematic translator. A translator at the UN before devoting himself to literary translation, in that capacity he was awarded the most important prizes. Along with the National Book Prize in 1981, the National Prize for Children’s Literature in Translation in 1983 and the National Prize for a Body of Work in 1991, he is the only Spanish translator to have won the EU’s Aristeion Prize (1998), and also the only one to have been awarded an honorary doctorate by Salamanca University in 2002.

In its reaction, the office of ACE Traductores said: ‘As a spokesperson for the whole of our profession, we want to congratulate Miguel Sáenz and rejoice at the presence in the Academy of one of its founding members, committed to all our struggles and demands, a member of the joint commission of translators and publishers, whose first words to the press after his election were a claim for his profession, our profession, “the eternal absentee when we talk about the chain that ensures the spread of literature.”’