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Jacobo Siruela

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In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Martínez de Irujo and the second or maternal family name is Fitz-James Stuart.
The Most Excellent
Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart
24th Count of Siruela, GE
Born
Jacobo José María Martínez de Irujo Fitz-James Stuart[1]

(1954-07-15) 15 July 1954 (age 70)
Madrid, Spain
Spouse(s)
María Eugenia Fernández de Castro y Fernández-Shaw
​
​
(m. 1980; div. 1998)​

​
(m. 2004)​
Children
  • Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart
  • Brianda Fitz-James Stuart
Parents
FamilyHouse of Alba

Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart y Martínez de Irujo, colloquially known as Jacobo Siruela (Madrid, July 15, 1954), is a Spanish aristocrat, 24th Count of Siruela, editor, writer, graphic designer, farmer and rancher.[2][3]

Biography

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Birth and family

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Jacobo, Count of Siruela, GE, a title dating from 1470.

Jacobo was born on July 15, 1954, in Madrid, Spain, in the bosom of the House of Alba, one of the most important and traditional families of the Spanish aristocracy. He was the third son of the 18th Duchess of Alba de Tormes Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart and Luis Martínez de Irujo y Artázcoz, a son of the Dukes of Sotomayor and Marquises of Casa Irujo.

Like his older brother, Carlos Fitz-James Stuart y Martínez de Irujo, 19th Duke of Alba de Tormes and current head of the House of Alba, he inverted the order of his surnames, so his surnames are Fitz-James Stuart y Martínez de Irujo instead of Martínez de Irujo y Fitz-James Stuart.

In 1980, his mother granted him the title of Count of Siruela, GE, which dates back to 1470. In any case, as he belonged to the Republic of Letters, he always signed, apart from his complicated surnames, simply: Jacobo Siruela.

On November 1, 1980, he married María Eugenia Fernández de Castro y Fernández-Shaw in the Liria Palace, from whom he separated after ten years. From this union he had two children: Jacobo and Brianda.

For ten years, from 1990 to 1999, Jacobo had as his common-law partner the graphic designer and painter Gloria Gauger.

Since 2004 his current wife is Inka Martí Kiemann, whom he married in Venice,[4] sharing a stay between Mas Pou, in Vilaür, Girona, Madrid and Larrodrigo, in Salamanca, where through his mother's inheritance he acquired a farm converted into a project ("Airhón Project")[5][6] that combines biodiversity research with organic agriculture and livestock farming.[7][8][9][10][11][12][13]

Career as an editor

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Image showing, from left to right, Jacobo Siruela, Antonio Escohotado, Albert Hofmann and Ernst Jünger. The photo was taken in 1992, during a visit to the Liria Palace.

After studying Philosophy and Literature at the Autonomous University of Madrid, he began his activity as an editor in 1980 with the publication of a bibliophile book by an anonymous French author from the 13th century, Le Morte d'Arthur, winning the first prize awarded by the Ministry of Culture for the best published book of the year.[14]

In 1982, at the age of 26, he founded Ediciones Siruela. His first book, Sir Gawain y el Caballero Verde, inaugurated a collection in which all the most important novels of the Arthurian cycle were published for the first time in Spain. In 1983 he edited the Biblioteca de Babel, directed and with a prologue by Jorge Luis Borges and published in Italy by Franco Maria Ricci, and in 1987 he edited his own collection of fantastic literature, El Ojo sin Párpado.[15]

In December 1985, the first issue of El Paseante appeared, an interdisciplinary cultural magazine that, from the broad and free perspective of the urban voyeur, offered a wide sample of the most important cultural and aesthetic ideas of the 1980s. Its last issue was published in 1998.

In 1989 he launched a contemporary literary collection, Libros del Tiempo, which opened with the famous essay by Italo Calvino Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio. Robert Walser, Amos Oz, George Steiner, Álvaro Mutis, António Lobo Antunes, María Zambrano, Peter Sloterdijk, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, James Hillman, Clarice Lispector, Cees Nooteboom, Edmond Jabès, Antonio Gamoneda, Juan Eduardo Cirlot, Henry Corbin, Walter F. Otto, Károly Kerényi, Raimon Panikkar, Gershom Scholem, Leonora Carrington, Luis Cernuda, Felisberto Hernández, Carmen Martín Gaite, Jostein Gaarder y Hans Magnus Enzensberger are some of the writers, philosophers and poets that are part of his catalogue.[16]

Other collections designed and edited by Jacobo Siruela are: El Árbol del Paraíso, La Biblioteca Azul, Biblioteca Medieval, La Biblioteca Sumergida, Biblioteca de Ensayo (Serie Mayor y Serie Menor), Biblioteca Italo Calvino[17] and Biblioteca Lobo Antunes, and the children's literature collection Las Tres Edades, directed by Michi Strausfeld, with hits such as Sofies verden and Caperucita en Manhattan.

He also published some books that represented a great editorial challenge, such as the edition of the greatest Spanish architectural treatise: El templo de Salomón by the Jesuit from Cordoba Juan Bautista Villalpando (1552–1608).

In 2000 he sold his entire company to Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, although he continued to serve as editorial director of Ediciones Siruela.[18]

In 2003 he won the National Prize for the Best Editorial Work awarded by the Ministry of Culture and in 2004 the Daniel Gil Prize for Editorial Design.

Image of Jacobo Siruela.
Inka Martí with Jacobo Siruela in 2005, the year Ediciones Atalanta was founded.

In 2005 he left Siruela to found, together with his wife, the journalist Inka Martí, Ediciones Atalanta,[19][20] based in Vilaür (Girona).[21] The publishing house develops its catalogue in four collections:[22][23]

Ars Brevis, with authors ranging from classics such as Vivant Denon, Apuleius, Vernon Lee, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Ivan Turgenev, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde and Heinrich von Kleist, to discoveries such as Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Naiyer Masud, Robert Aickman, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Yasutaka Tsutsui, Alejo Carpentier, Ednodio Quintero or Alberto Chimal. It also includes various anthologies dedicated to diverse themes: vampires, the fantastic story, about the mirror, decadentism and dreams.

Memoria Mundi brings together such outstanding works in Spanish as Murasaki Shikibu's Genji Monogatari, the Jin Ping Mei, the Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Diamond Sutra followed by the Heart Sutra, the first translation of the I Ching from Chinese, the first complete version in Spanish of Giacomo Casanova's Histoire de ma vie, the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud, the One Thousand and One Nights, the Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or the complete works of Joseph Campbell. Authors such as Peter Kingsley, Richard Tarnas, Sonu Shamdasani, Jeffrey J. Kripal, José Joaquín Parra Bañón, Bernardo Kastrup, Algis Uždavinys, David Fideler, R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Pythagoras or Jakob Böhme also take part.

Imaginatio Vera, with authors such as Patrick Harpur, René Daumal, James Hillman, Michael Maier, Max Ernst, Joscelyn Godwin, Károly Kerényi, Alain Daniélou, William Blake, Remedios Varo, Joseph Campbell, André Breton, Gary Lachman, Jeffrey Raff, William K. Mahony, Hilma af Klint, Edwin A. Abbott, Charles H. Hinton, Claude Bragdon or Pierre Mabille.

Liber Naturae, which includes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Henri Bortoft, Alfred North Whitehead, Jeremy Naydler, Arthur Firstenberg, Stephan Harding, Changlin Zhang or Christian de Quincey.

On November 27, 2014, he was awarded Person of the Year by Fuera de Serie, the supplement of the newspaper Expansión, in Madrid.[24][2]

On April 30, 2018, he was awarded the Medal of Merit by the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico.[25][26][27]

Works

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Jacobo Siruela next to the Nile in Egypt, 2004.

In 2010, coinciding with the fifth anniversary of Ediciones Atalanta, Jacobo began his literary debut with the work El mundo bajo los párpados,[28][29][30] chosen in 2010 in second place in the essay section among the ten best titles of the year according to the Babelia supplement of El País, among the ten best books of the magazine Qué Leer and in seventh place on the list of the outstanding ones of the Reforma newspaper of Mexico.

Also noteworthy in his new journey in Atalanta, and in connection with the publication of his two celebrated collections of fantastic literature in Ediciones Siruela (the Biblioteca de Babel and El Ojo sin Párpado), is the publication of two anthologies: one of stories about vampires (2010) as well as the Antología universal del relato fantástico (2013).

He is also the author of «Historia mínima de la Casa de Alba», published in the volume on El palacio de Liria (2012), together with texts by other authors.

In the autumn of 2015, and this time coinciding again with the tenth anniversary of Atalanta, he published his second essay entitled Libros, secretos.[31][32][33]

In November 2017, together with Jaime Rosal, he edited a new anthology, this time dedicated to decadentism.[34][35][36]

In November 2023, he published the anthology De planilandia a la cuarta dimension.

Awards

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  • First prize awarded by the Ministry of Culture to the best published book of the year for La muerte de Arturo in 1981.
  • National Award for Best Editorial Work awarded by the Ministry of Culture in 2003 to Ediciones Siruela.
  • Daniel Gil Award for Editorial Design in 2004.
  • On November 27, 2014, he was awarded Person of the Year in Madrid for Fuera de Serie, the Expansión supplement.
  • On April 30, 2018, he was awarded the Medal of Merit in Mexico by the Universidad Veracruzana.

Titles and treatments

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  • July 15, 1954 – June 9, 1982: His Illustrious Mr. Jacobo Martínez de Irujo y Fitz-James Stuart[note 1]
  • June 9, 1982 – present: His Excellency the Count of Siruela[37]

* See Royal and noble styles

Ancestors

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Notes

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  1. ^ As he was not the first-born son of a Spanish grandee, his mother was then the Duchess of Montoro.

References

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  1. ^ Full name on Empresia.es.
  2. ^ a b "Premio al editor Jacobo Siruela". Expansión.com. Magazine Fuera de Serie. Retrieved November 13, 2014.
  3. ^ Ostáriz, Ritxi (September 15, 2020). "Libros, secretos; con Jacobo Siruela" (audio). Ivoox. El Libro Rojo. Retrieved September 15, 2020.
  4. ^ Pina Uruburu, Marina (November 25, 2017). "Jacobo Siruela, el verso suelto de la familia Alba". El Mundo. Retrieved November 25, 2017.
  5. ^ "Airhón. El hoyo de los lobos". 30 April 2024. Retrieved June 23, 2024.
  6. ^ "Visita replicación Finca Muñovel". LIFE Regenerate. November 19, 2018. Retrieved October 2, 2024.
  7. ^ "Inka Martí — El divino Narciso". September 25, 2022. Retrieved September 25, 2022.
  8. ^ Cerrillo, Antonio (June 2, 2024). "Jacobo, el hijo ecologista de la duquesa de Alba, convierte su herencia en refugio de naturaleza". La Vanguardia. Retrieved June 2, 2024.
  9. ^ Cerrillo, Antonio (June 2, 2024). ""La acción ecológica no debe ser de un campo ideológico, todos la debemos asumir"". La Vanguardia. Retrieved June 2, 2024.
  10. ^ Gallego, Jose Luis (June 2, 2024). "De coto de caza al mayor vedado de Europa: cómo vivir del campo respetándolo". El Confidencial. Retrieved June 2, 2024.
  11. ^ Raffio, Valentina (June 2, 2024). "Vacas y animales salvajes conviven en un paraje que recupera la naturaleza ibérica de antaño". El Periódico. Retrieved June 2, 2024.
  12. ^ G. May, Pedro Pablo (June 1, 2024). "Rewilding: el aullido de la Naturaleza que permite combinar biodiversidad y agroganadería". elDiario.es. Retrieved June 3, 2024.
  13. ^ Pita, Elena (June 28, 2024). "Inka Martí, editora y ecologista: "El negacionismo del cambio climático es como el timo del crecepelo: no os preocupéis, vamos a ser inmortales"". El Periódico de España. Retrieved June 29, 2024.
  14. ^ Ortega Lucas, Miguel Ángel (March 14, 2024). ""Editar es difundir entusiasmos"". Ctxt. Retrieved March 15, 2024.
  15. ^ Azancot, Nuria (February 24, 2023). "Jacobo Siruela: "El progreso nos está destruyendo"". El Cultural. Retrieved February 24, 2023.
  16. ^ Estrada, Amparo (June 10, 2023). "Jacobo Siruela: el conde de las letras". Leonoticias. Retrieved June 10, 2023.
  17. ^ Correal, Francisco (November 26, 2022). "Italo Calvino sigue hospedado en el hotel Inglaterra". Diario de Sevilla. Retrieved November 26, 2022.
  18. ^ Ortega Lucas, Miguel Ángel (March 2024). ""Editar es difundir entusiasmos"". Ctxt & Salida de emergencia. Retrieved March 28, 2024.
  19. ^ Harguindey, Ángel S. (2 October 2005). "Entrevista en El País". El País. Retrieved November 27, 2011.
  20. ^ Maciejewski, David G. (March 19, 2023). "Jacobo Siruela, el editor de sangre azul y místico de la Casa de Alba: "La IA nos conduce a desórdenes sociales y psicológicos, al caos"". Porfolio, La Revista, El Español. Retrieved March 23, 2023.
  21. ^ Arnau, Juan (February 11, 2017). "La vida no es un teatro de máquinas como nos quieren hacer creer: todo lo vivo es misterioso y bello". Posdata. Levante. El Mercantil Valenciano. Retrieved February 10, 2017.
  22. ^ Guinto, J. C. (July 14, 2019). "Jacobo Siruela: imaginación, brevedad y memoria". Confabulario. El Universal. Retrieved September 4, 2019.
  23. ^ Zanella, Jacobo (July 15, 2020). "Atalanta: brevedad y memoria, imaginación y naturaleza". Letras Libres. Retrieved July 16, 2020.
  24. ^ "Premio a los Personajes del Año". Expansión.com. Magazine Fuera de Serie. Retrieved November 28, 2014.
  25. ^ "El lenguaje nos une e identifica: medallistas al Mérito UV". Uv.mx. April 30, 2018. Retrieved April 30, 2018.
  26. ^ Garizurieta, Hugo (April 30, 2018). "Jacobo Siruela es galardonado con la Medalla al Mérito Universidad Veracruzana". Masnoticias.mx. Retrieved April 30, 2018.
  27. ^ "Conferencia magistral. Jacobo Siruela. Medalla al Mérito por la Universidad Veracruzana". TeleUV. April 30, 2018. Retrieved April 30, 2018.
  28. ^ Siruela, Jacobo (2010). El mundo bajo los párpados (quinta ed.).
  29. ^ "Quiénes somos". Retrieved July 25, 2019.
  30. ^ Merino, Olga (March 7, 2024). "El mundo bajo los párpados". El Periódico. Retrieved March 8, 2024.
  31. ^ Siruela, Jacobo (2015). Libros, secretos.
  32. ^ "Jacobo Siruela: "Me importan un comino las leyes y caprichos del mercado"". La Razón. Retrieved November 23, 2015.
  33. ^ "Revelan secretos y reflexiones del conde Siruela". Milenio. 7 April 2016. Retrieved November 30, 2016.
  34. ^ "Jacobo Siruela: "El refinamiento es lo más grato de la civilización"". Eldiario.es. November 18, 2017. Retrieved November 18, 2017.
  35. ^ Montesinos, Toni (November 30, 2017). "Éramos tan decadentes". La Razón. Retrieved December 1, 2017.
  36. ^ Siruela, Jacobo (December 10, 2017). "Elogio de la decadencia". El Mundo. Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  37. ^ "Guía de Títulos". Diputación Permanente y Consejo de la Grandeza de España y Títulos del Reino. Retrieved June 28, 2024.

Bibliography

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As author
As editor
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