On March 5, 2026, at 12:00 p.m., the lecture Life of a Linguist, delivered by Lucía Sesma Prieto, will take place in the Salón de Grados.

Lucía Sesma (Segovia, 1980) is a philologist who holds a degree in Hispanic Philology from the Complutense University of Madrid. She furthered her academic training at the Sorbonne in Paris, also specializing in editing and translation.

Throughout her professional career, she has worked as an editor, proofreader, and translator for various publishing houses. She has also taught contemporary literature and creative writing at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Minnesota. In addition, she was responsible for selecting the Spanish-language collection at the emblematic Librairie des Colonnes in Tangier. In 2013, she promoted and coordinated the essay Hijos de Babel, focused on a new generation of translators.

She stands out for her dual profile—both creative and research-oriented—within the field of the Spanish language.

Since 2011, she has participated as a linguist on the television program Pasapalabra, where she supervises the questions in the different segments (La Silla Azul, Una de cuatro, ¿Dónde están?, and El Rosco) and evaluates the contestants’ answers in the final “Rosco.”

She has published La caja de palabras (Alianza Editorial, 2024). This book reveals the fascinating power of language through captivating anecdotes, surprising episodes, and literary games centered on words. It proposes an itinerary with stops at decisive moments in history to discover, in an engaging way, the significance of choosing the precise term—or remaining silent at the right moment.

La caja de palabras brings together enigmas such as the cryptic messages of the Oracle of Delphi, the slip of the tongue at a press conference that precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall, the origin of the famous phrase “Houston, we have a problem,” the secret code of the Navajo soldiers during World War II, the first steps of Spanish among monastery pantries, the brilliant translations of the comics of our childhood, professions revolving around language, and the skill with which more and more women manage to seek safety by ordering a pizza. Figures such as Einstein, Lola Flores, Tolkien, Forges, Ramón y Cajal, María Moliner, Unamuno, Cortázar, and Galdós appear throughout its pages, in stories where the true protagonist is always language.