When Gabriel Garcia Marquez Saw Ernest Hemingway

For a fraction of a second, as always seemed to be the case, I found myself divided between my two competing roles. I didn’t know whether to ask him for an interview or cross the avenue to express my unqualified admiration for him. But with either proposition, I faced the same great inconvenience. At the time, I spoke the same rudimentary English that I still speak now, and I wasn’t very sure about his bullfighter’s Spanish. And so I didn’t do either of the things that could have spoiled that moment, but instead cupped both hands over my mouth and, like Tarzan in the jungle, yelled from one sidewalk to the other: ”Maaaeeestro!” Ernest Hemingway understood that there could be no other master amid the multitude of students, and he turned, raised his hand and shouted to me in Castillian in a very childish voice, ”Adiooos, amigo!” It was the only time I saw him.

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Cervantes prize goes to Chilean poet Parra

Chilean poet Nicanor Parra has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor, for his influential work mixing everyday slang with traditional verse. The 97-year-old poet, essayist and physics graduate was announced the winner Thursday in Madrid by Spanish Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde. He published his first book of poetry in 1937 and eventually adopted the style he called anti-poetry, introducing colloquial language into traditional poetry, the Spanish Culture Ministry said. He has won the Chilean National Literature Award twice — in 1969 and again in 1981 — and his work has been translated into many languages. The euro125,000 ($170,000) prize honors writers who contribute to the richness of Spanish-language literature, and generally alternates between Spanish and Latin American writers. Last year, it went to Spain's Ana Maria Matute.

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Jorge Volpi's address at the Guadalajara International Book Fair's Reading Promoters Conference.

“Fiction teaches us to be human” is the phrase that opened the Reading Promoters Conference as part of the address by Jorge Volpi, that ran longer than expected due to the great interest shown by the audience on the subject proposed by the writer: fiction as a tool for reading and in everyday life to go into other consciousness, other lives and experiment new things to be better persons in real life.

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