Leading specialist in toponymy elected by the Royal Galician Academy as new "full member"

Gonzalo Navaza, nunha foto de archivo BERNABÉ / GUTIER

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The Real Academia Galega has elected Gonzalo Navaza (Lalín, 1957) "full member" (académico de número). Translator and leading specialist in toponymy, Gonzalo Ramón Navaza Blanco is a Professor in the Department of Galician Philology at the University of Vigo and has been part of the Royal Galician Academy within "Seminario de Onomástica" since 2012.

His career as a researcher in onomastics began in the 1980s, when he collected through topographic fieldwork and corrected toponyms on the maps of the National Geographic Institute for the provinces of Pontevedra and Ourense. Among other works, he published "Fitotoponimia galega" (2006), a monumental work about 8,000 place-names corresponding to 150 different botanical species (Losada Diéguez Research Prize in 2007), "Toponimia de Catoira" (Lois Peña Novo Prize in 2008), and recently "Os nomes dos concellos da provincia da Coruña" (2021). He is part of the project 'Dicionario de apelidos galegos'.

He has also translated into Galician classics such as "The Call of the Wild" by Jack London (1982); "Sherlock Holmes" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1986) and "Robinson Crusoe" by Daniel Defoe (1986). His version of "Hound of Baskerville" was awarded the Ramón Cabanillas Literary Translation Prize in 1991.