Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, has begun shooting his latest film, "Christopher Columbus: The Enigma,".

The film is based on the book "Cristóvão Colombo Era Português" (Columbus was Portuguese), by Manuel Luciano da Silva and Silvia Jorge da Silva, which claims that Columbus was born in a small town in Portugal's hinterland, called Cuba, in whose honor he named the island of Cuba.

The film will be shot in the U.S. and Portugal and it's premiere is scheduled for July in Washington.

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Portuguese Cinema

Two giants of literature, one black eye and 30 years of silence

It is possibly the most famous literary feud of modern times: Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel prize-winning author, and Mario Vargas Llosa, his fellow giant of Latin American literature, have refused to talk to each other for three decades.

Once great friends, the two writers have steadfastly refused to talk about the reasons behind their spectacular bust-up, and so have their wives.

Now two pictures have appeared in which a youthful García Márquez shows off a black eye, and the photographer who took them has shed light on the origins of the feud. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it involves a woman.

Rodrigo Moya, a close friend of García Marquez, took the black-and-white pictures in 1976 but has kept them secret until this week. He decided to publish them to coincide with García Marquez’s 80th birthday and has broken his silence in a tongue-in-cheek account of the night in which GarcÍa Marquez and Vargas Llosa brawled, entitled “The Horrific Story of the Black Eye”.

The photographs, which first appeared in La Jornadain Mexico show a shiner under GarcÍa Márquez’s left eye and a cut on his nose. In one, the Colombian novelist is looking deadly serious. In the other, he grins broadly from under his moustache, as if acknowledging that the picture would one day become a classic.

According to Mr Moya, various Latin American artists and intellectuals had gathered in Mexico City for a film premiére in 1976. After the film, García Márquez went to embrace his close friend, Vargas Llosa. “Mario!” he managed to say, before receiving a “tremendous blow” to the face from the Peruvian author.

“How dare you come and greet me after what you did to Patricia in Barcelona!” Vargas Llosa reportedly shouted, referring to his wife.

Amid the screams of some women, García Marquez sat on the floor with a profusely bleeding nose, as the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska ran to get a steak for his eye. Two days later, Mr Moya took the photos of his friend’s black eye.

The long feud between the two literary heavyweights has also been one of the most colourful. The two men had been close friends – so much so that Mr García Márquez is godfather to Mr Vargas Llosa’s second son, Gabriel.

After the cinema fight, however, the two stopped speaking and embarked on radically different paths. García Marquez stuck to his Leftist leanings, developing a close friendship with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Vargas Llosa became an ardent admirer of Margaret Thatcher and ran for President of Peru on a Right-wing platform. He has been one of President Castro’s most outspoken critics.

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Latin American Literature

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