Given for a writer's lifetime achievement, The Miguel de Cervantes Prize is the most important award that a Spanish-language writer can receive. Established in 1976, it has been granted to such major literary figures as Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa, all later Nobel Prize winners. This course studies the works and careers of the seven women authors who have received this award: the Spanish essayist María Zambrano (1988), Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz (1992), the Spanish novelist and short story writer Ana María Matute (2010), the Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowska (2013), the Uruguayan poet Vida Vitale (2017), and the also Uruguayan novelist Cristina Peri Rossi (2021). In addition to representing a cross section of the modern Hispanic literary tradition, encompassing poets, novelists, and essayists, as well as writers from Spain, Mexico and the Southern Cone, the authors studied in the course raise questions about the patriarchal biases present in the Hispanic and other cultural establishments, as well as about what makes a writer canonical.