Isabel Burdiel received in 2011 the National History Award for a biography of Isabel II of Spain, becoming the second woman, after Carmen Iglesias, to receive this prize. She is specialised in the XIX century, and she is also interested in the relations between history and literature, and in biography. She has devoted an important part of her work to women historiography and identity construction research. Among her first publications, there are texts like La política de los notables (1987), the critical editions of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1994) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1996), with an introductory study, or the essay La dama de blanco. She has been the organiser of the exhibition that the Biblioteca Nacional de España has dedicated to the Galician writer in 2021 on the occasion of the centenary of her death.

According to what its regulations stipulate, in the 2021 corresponding call, the RAE award is given to a general or Hispanic philological research work, originally written in Spanish and published in its first edition in 2019 or 2020.

The jury has underlined that "it is a rigorous biographic study, with a wide critical apparatus, which analyses the author's life and literary path placing her in the historical context of her time".

It was not allowed to present previously published works, even if the new edition is corrected and extended. The award has a 20,000 euros economic endowment, which is given together with a commemorative medal. The regulations establish that each candidacy has to be presented by a minimum of three numerary academicians of the RAE or from any of the other academies members of the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE), as by any of the winners from the previous calls. In this category, candidacies can also be presented by departments or university faculties as well as by literary, linguistic and philological research institutes from the Hispanic area. Works from numerary academicians or elected members from any of the academies of the Asociación cannot be proposed for the award.