Patrick Johansson, Alfonso Reyes International Prize winner

From the Editorial Staff

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, July 19, 2025, p. 3

Academic, researcher, and professor Patrick Johansson was honored yesterday with the 2025 Alfonso Reyes International Prize, awarded by the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (Inbal), the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, and the International Alfonsina Society.

According to a statement from Inbal, the jury – composed of Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Beatriz Saavedra Gastélum and Víctor Barrera Enderle – recognized the author of Alfonso Reyes and the Indigenous World for the breadth of his career, the solidity of his humanistic work, the important exploration and dissemination of the pre-Hispanic world, and his outstanding work as an academic, researcher and professor of the Nahuatl language .

The record that Johansson's work represents, without a doubt, a continuation and an amplification of the great Alfonsine legacy .

The 2025 Alfonso Reyes International Award consists of recognition and a financial incentive. The awards ceremony will be held in November.

Of French origin and naturalized Mexican, for Patrick Johansson (Rouen, 1946), obtaining this award represents something extraordinary ; in his words, it is like a Nobel Prize .

He thanked the jury for this distinction as a passionate fan of the literature of Alfonso Reyes, whom he considers the best Mexican writer and one of the greatest in world literature.

Johansson holds a bachelor's degree in literature and a master's degree in comparative literature from the University of Bordeaux, and a doctorate in literature from the University of Paris-Sorbonne.

He was a student of the Mexican historian and philosopher Miguel León-Portilla (1926-2019), whom he has publicly recognized as a key figure and influence in his training and career.

In 1992, he began collaborating with the Graduate Studies Division of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, and in 1993 with the Institute of Historical Research, both at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

He is the author of works such as Celebrations, Propitiatory Rites and Pre-Hispanic Rituals (1992); Ángel María Garibay K. The Wheel and the River (1993 and 2013), co-authored with Miguel León-Portilla; Ahnelhuayoxóchitl: Flower without Roots (1993); Pre-Columbian Nahuatl Mortuary Rites (1998), and Spanish and Nahuatl (2020).

He joined the Mexican Academy of Language in 2010; he has been a member of the Royal Spanish Academy since October of that year; and in 2014, he received the Eustaquio Buelna Chair in Linguistics at El Colegio de Sinaloa, among other awards.

▲ Five of New York City’s most iconic dance companies—Ballet Hispanico, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem—will unite on stage from July 29 to August 2 to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the BAAND Together Dance Festival at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater. American Ballet Theatre dancer Gillian Murphy (pictured) performs Jerome Robbins’ Other Dances during the festival’s third edition. In this iteration, the company will offer Midnight Pas de Deux, an introspective and poetic duet set to the adagio from Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D minor, with choreography by American Ballet Theatre Artistic Director Susan Jaffe. Photo Ap

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, July 19, 2025, p. 3