Patti Smith 2026 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts

Patricia Lee “Patti” Smith (Chicago, USA, 30th December 1946), singer, songwriter and poet, known as ‘the godmother of punk’, brought an intellectual point of view to this movement and became one of the most influential artists in rock music. She grew up in Philadelphia and Woodbury (New Jersey). After graduating from school, she began working at a young age in a toy factory due to the economic hardships her family were going through. She moved to New York in 1967 and worked as a bookseller, columnist, songwriter and playwright, encouraged by playwright and actor Sam Shepard, with whom she wrote Cowboy Mouth (1971). After a stay in Paris, in 1971, she returned to New York and recorded several songs with Allen Lanier of the Blue Öyster Cult rock band. 
Having become a cultural icon over the last five decades, Patti Smith’s career has, according to experts, transcended the limits of the strictly musical to become a multidisciplinary and iconoclastic communicator through different forms of artistic expression such as poetry, photography, performance and video installation. Endowed with extraordinary charisma, Smith has also linked her proposals to her commitment to different political and social causes and is considered an icon of activism and the fight for civil rights. In 1974, she recorded Hey Joe / Piss Factory, her first single with the Patti Smith Group. In 1975, the group rose to fame with their debut album Horses, which fused punk rock and spoken word poetry. The Patti Smith Group also released Easter (1978) and Wave (1979). Easter contained their hit single Because the Night, written in collaboration with Bruce Springsteen. In the eighties, Patti Smith practically retired from music, until releasing Dream of Life in 1988. In 1995, a year after the death of her husband and brother, she toured with Bob Dylan (2007 Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts) and in 1996 she returned to work with her regular band, recording Gone Again. This was followed by the albums Peace and Noise (1997), Gung Ho (2000), Land (1975-2002) (2002) and Trampin’ (2004). In 2005 she reissued Horses, recorded live at the Meltdown Festival in London. Some of her latest albums include Twelve (2007) and Banga (2012). Influenced by the work of the American Beat Generation, she has also clearly manifested her taste for 19th-century French poetry, especially that of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Verlaine, as well as her devotion to authors such as García Lorca and Roberto Bolaño from Chile, for whom she composed a song. In 1972 she published her first book of poems, Seventh Heaven, which was followed by Witt (1973), kodak (1977), Babel (1978), Woolgathering (1992), Early Work (1994), The Coral Sea (1996) and Auguries of Innocence (2005), among others. As a storyteller, she has published several critically acclaimed memoirs, including Just Kids (2010), which won the U.S. National Book Award, M Train (2015), and Year of the Monkey (2019). In 2025, she published her latest memoir, Bread of Angels. 
Smith has also poured her artistic talent into photography and other disciplines. She has held exhibitions and published the picture book entitled A Book of Days (2022).  At the end of 2022, she presented a visual and sound installation inspired by Rimbaud, Artaud and Daumal at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Currently, she continues to perform concerts and poetry recitals and to work with artists from different fields, such as the group Soundwalk Collective. It was with this group that, during 2024, she presented on stages and cultural centres around the world a piece called “Correspondences”, mixing audiovisual art and performance to warn about the climate crisis. She is currently heading an extensive worldwide concert tour, which began last year, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the album Horses. 
Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters (2005) and Officer of the French Legion of Honour (2002), she holds Spain’s Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (1998), an honorary degree from Columbia University (USA) and in 2007 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2011, she received the Polar Music Prize (Sweden) and in 2020 the Washington University International Humanities Prize (USA). In 2021, her album Horses was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. That same year, she received the Medal of the City of New York.