Spanish author Luis Leante was Friday awarded the Alfaguara Spanish literary prize for his novel "Mira Si Yo Te Querré".

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Spanish Literature

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

The short list for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was released, with Portuguese and Spanish languages represented by Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa and Spanish Javier Marías.

THE SHORTLIST

The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa

In Angola, an observant gecko watches as the albino Felix Ventura supplies new biographies to his guilty or vulnerable clients. We (and the gecko) hear their stories as the spy, the photographer or the minister try to re-fashion troubled lives amid the turmoil of post-colonial Africa. Humorous and quizzical, with a light touch on weighty themes, the narrative darts about with lizard-like colour and velocity.
Your Face Tomorrow, 2: Dance and Dream, by Javier Marías

It stands alone as a self-sufficient work, but this novel is also the mid-point of a trilogy. In a brilliantly drawn London, Deza works for an obscure espionage outfit, a watcher unsure of his mission and his unfathomable boss. In the sinuous, gorgeous prose of a true virtuoso of European fiction, scenes of offbeat comedy gives way to memories of horror, and incidents from the Spanish Civil War summon up all the unquiet dead.

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Roberto Matta - Nacimiento de América (The Birth of America)

Colombian Writer Mario Mendoza's novel Satanás(2002), has been adapted to a movie directed by Andrés Baiz.

This drama interweaves several stories about a priest, a con woman and an English teacher, all of whom want more from life than what it can offer. As each is tempted by a taste of their deepest desires, their character is tested to the core.

Mario Mendoza received the Premio Biblioteca Breve, from Editorial Seix Barral, one of the most prestigious prizes in the Spanish literary world, with Satanás.

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Colombian Literature

Casa de América in Madrid pays tribute to Colombian author, Gabriel García Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature 25 years ago and who celebrates his 80th birthday tomorrow.

The homage, which started at 9am this morning and is expected to last for around sixteen hours, consists of a public reading of his best-known novel 'A hundred years of solitude' (1967), at the Palacio de Linares that is the headquarters of the Casa de América in Madrid.

Each reader will complete a fifteen minute stint, during which they are expected to get through around seven pages.

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Latin American Literature

Interview with Daniel Alarcon

Daniel Alarcón may be the model for a certain kind of future great American novelist. Born in Peru, raised in Alabama and educated at Columbia, Alarcón, 29, writes in English about events happening back home in his native Lima.

His debut novel, "Lost City Radio," depicts the trauma inflicted upon a society when its men and women "are disappeared." The tale takes its title from a popular radio show in what Alarcón calls "the provincial capital" of a fictional Latin American country. Each Sunday, the station broadcasts the names of the missing.

As the book begins, a boy travels from a remote village to the capital with a list of names to be read on air — and it turns out one of the names is one near and dear to the show's journalist host.

Alarcón, visiting New York from his home in Oakland, Calif., spoke about his novel just days before Granta magazine named him one of the 21 best young novelists in America.

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

Daniel Alarcón writes with a poet's heart and a reporter's skill. He began researching the book in 1999, interviewing those who'd survived the violence that tore through his native Peru, and studying other conflicts around the globe. His journalism paid off. "Lost City Radio" is filled with startling images that are impossible to shake: A boy from the rain forest longs to see the ocean, not to play in the surf, but to search for his mother's battered body. Government soldiers bury prisoners to their necks, then urinate on their faces. Rebels lop off a man's hands while his children watch.

But all is not carnage and cruelty. Alarcón understands the yin/yang of warfare and its aftermath, and describes with beautiful, succinct prose how opposing sensibilities - loyalty and treachery, tenderness and brutality - can co-exist in the same body, the same place, like dandelions poking through chunks of broken asphalt.

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Latin American Literature

Interview with Alberto Fuguet

(Writer and filmmaker Alberto Fuguet appeared in the late 1990s as one of the most notable exponents of the so-called New Chilean Narrative. His style is a sarcastic response to the Latin American magical realism literature genre and it often portrays its characters as individuals who have suddenly lost all identity and self-assertiveness. By these means, Fuguet is able to summarize Chilean society’s biggest cultural dilemmas.

(In this interview with La Nación, Alberto Fuguet talks about his latest book, “Apuntes autistas (Autistic notes),” a collection of random notes made by the author since 1994, and his next steps in filmmaking.)

QUESTION: Do you still see writing as a form of salvation?
ALBERTO FUGUET: There is something of faith in this. I think all narrations-- books, music, records, movies, or TV series--are good for your balance. They help. They accompany you. They are like those emergency help phone lines. They are your best friends when you have no friends left or can’t go to them or you just don’t want to bother anyone.

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Chilean Literature

Basque writer Jon Juaristi (Bilbao, 1951) wins the Premio Azorín with his first novel “La Caza Salvaje”.

In the novel, Juaristi uses a myth of infernal hunters of the forest to tell the life of a Basque priest that decides that to survive, in the period between the Spanish Civil War and the birth of ETA, he must lie and betray.

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Spanish Literature

Daniel Alarcón in Granta's Best Young American Novelists list.

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Latin American Literature

Interview with Viggo Mortensen about his role in the movie Alatristedirected by Agustín Díaz Yanes and based on the novel series written by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.


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Spanish Cinema

Resurrección
La poesía entra en el sueño
como un buzo en un lago.
La poesía, más valiente que nadie,
entra y cae
a plomo
en un lago infinito como Loch Ness
o turbio e infausto como el lago Balatón.
Contempladla desde el fondo:
un buzo
inocente
envuelto en las plumas
de la voluntad.
La poesía entra en el sueño
como un buzo muerto
en el ojo de Dios.

Roberto Bolaño