By IANS/EFE,
Santiago : Peruvian poet Antonio Cisneros has been named the winner of the 2010 Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Prize.
The Chilean government confers the prize in honour of the country’s late Nobel laureate.
Chilean Culture Minister Luciano Cruz-Coke chaired the jury.
Chilean President Sebastian Pinera will present the $30,000 prize to Cisneros in a ceremony July 12, marking the 106th anniversary of Neruda’s birth.
Cisneros is “a poet with notable influence over the younger generations” in Latin America, the jury said in a statement Tuesday.
Cisneros said he had two personal encounters with the Nobel laureate. First at a birthday party for Neruda and second during a writers’ conference on Isla Negra, where Neruda (1904-1973) kept a vacation home and where he and wife Matilde Urrutia are buried.