Nobel Prize in Literature and Peruvian Hispanic writer Mario Vargas Llosa is in Latin America this Tuesday writers are not as welcome as they were 30 years ago and in some cases, they do get prizes, with reference to Nicaragua, though other times they are discarded. Sergio Ramirez.
Vargas Llosa (Arequipa, Peru, 1936) was honored this afternoon at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid with a show curated by the Sergio Ramírez Cervantes Prize winner. The first part of a study compiling the author’s sixty years of journalistic production, in this case the first volume is devoted to culture, and especially to literary criticism.
By editor Pilar Reyes, in conversation with author Carlos Granés (Colombia) and moderator Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), editor and foreword to the first volume of this work “Fire of imagination: books, scenes, screens and museums” (2023), Vargas Llosa remembered his beginnings as a writer and made sure that he did not recognize himself in the early articles that compose it. book.
This book is about eight hundred pages long. to the author’s literary creation of the 20th century and the journey so far of the 21st century, Through articles spanning over 20 years from his time as a novice reader in Lima.
“I don’t recognize most of the texts because they were written a long time ago and others are advocating views that are no longer mine. but it also constitutes an author’s story. The rich, contradictory, complex past is essential, with so many contradictory articles in it, and only now, when read, reminds us of certain episodes in Peruvian and Latin American history that are inevitable,” said Vargas Llosa.
The Nobel Prize in Literature described how he started writing at a very young age in a newspaper while he was still in school. How difficult it was to reach the literature of other countries in Peru because it was so isolated back then.
“I remember very well the first time I heard about Borges”with whom he confessed to having a contradictory relationship: “I was a member of the Communist Party at the time, and Borges represented everything that communism hated: he did not believe in reality or social problems,” he wrote, inspired by classic books about the exotics of the worlds”, so already secretly at night. I had to read.
He also reported “If you wanted to be a writer, you had to leave Peru, where no one made a living like that.”and she remembered that her dream was to go to Paris, where she bought a book that changed her life as soon as she arrived: “Madame Bovary”: “Flaubert gave me the passion for the novel and the faith of being a writer,” she said.
Regarding the situation of writers, he noted that things have now changed in Latin America.There’s a ruthless right-wing largely made up of the military, and they’re giving out awards to writers.” and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega said a “sinister” character such as “awarding” some writers and throwing others out, citing Sergio Ramírez, who was stripped of his nationality.
on his behalfRamírez noted that “a lot of the drama in Latin America is that freedom is good for some, but not for all.”There is still “a certain left that does not recognize dictatorships” today.
Others on Peru will follow the first volume of Vargas Llosa’s journalism and essay on literature and art. A more personal fifth, about the troubled areas of the world, the challenges of today’s society, and the travels and people that influenced the author, all published by Alfaguara.
Participates in the memory and work of Vargas Llosa Spanish writers and Latin American writers residing in Madrid such as Rosa Montero, Héctor Abad Facilone, Gioconda Belli or Jorge Eduardo Benavides for two days.