This week in an act at the Casa América in Madrid led by the delegate of the Caro y Cuervo Institute in Spain, Martín Gómez, these experts analyzed the work of their compatriot and explained questions about the author’s literature, but also about the political and society in which he received the award.
Samper made a tour of the great work, to which he dedicated more than a year of his life, just in the writing part. García Márquez was obsessed with One Hundred Years of Solitude long before knowing that it was going to be called that, the writer introduced him, who recounted several of the epiphanies that the also journalist had to write the famous novel. One of them was to return to Aracataca, the town where he was born, which, according to Samper, was already half a Nobel Prize winner, giving rise to the creation of Macondo, a small town on the Colombian coast where the story takes place.
Samper also recalled García Márquez’s years in exile, after fleeing the civic-military government of Julio César Turbay in 1981, who saw Gabo as part of a communist joint venture.
“Gabo’s exile is absolutely unfair, he was never a communist, he was very much to the left, he was a friend of Cuba, he loved power in general and felt very attracted to it, he got the wave that they were going to arrest him at least to question him and he left,” he recalled.
For her part, Alexandra Saavedra, professor at the Faculty of Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid, alluded to the moment that Latin American literature was going through when the Swedish Academy decided in 1982 to award the Nobel Prize to García Márquez. “The current of the boom was coming, but that boom in Latin American literature was already beginning to fade, to lose intensity,” she explained before estimating that the prize gave a new impetus to the titles of the region.
Along these lines, he argued that the Latin American boom, also formed by the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa or the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, allowed the eyes of the European and Anglo-Saxon publishing world to discover voices and techniques from the region.
Despite this, it also overshadowed other Latin American writers who were carrying out interesting proposals with styles other than those of this group. “The shadow of García Márquez makes what is happening in Latin America visible, but it casts a shadow over those who did not agree with what was editorially associated with Gabo’s writing,” he added.
Event. The Gabo Festival began this Friday with a tenth edition in which it will recognize Ibero-American journalism for the first time in Bogotá and is also the center of the celebrations for the 40th anniversary of Gabriel García Márquez’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
From Friday until today, the Colombian capital hosts more than 100 activities including conferences, concerts and exhibitions on topics related to poetry, literature, the environment, innovation, gender, feminism, emerging media, sound narratives, press freedom and peace, among others.
“It is not a program of journalism that has already passed, but of journalism that will come and its relations with citizens,” the general director of the Gabo Foundation, Jaime Abello, told EFE.
Among the participants in this edition, renowned Ibero-American journalists stand out, such as the Argentine Leila Guerriero, the Mexican Carmen Aristegui, the Venezuelan Luz Mely Reyes and the Spanish María Jesús Espinosa de los Monteros, as well as the Nicaraguan writer and former vice president Sergio Ramírez.
Among its vast programming, the Gabo Festival has several activities that seek to vindicate the legacy of García Márquez not only as a writer but also as a journalist. “The festival has a great reason for celebration, which is the 40th anniversary of the Nobel Prize for Gabriel García Márquez, and I say this because 40 years ago Gabo had the luxury of saying in an interview after receiving this award that he did not want to be remembered. for the Nobel. He said, ‘I’d rather be remembered by the newspaper,’” Abello stated.
The director of the Gabo Foundation added that at that time the writer had a project to make a national newspaper that was going to be called The otherbut it was cancelled.
The Gabo Prize is awarded at the festival, whose winners were announced last week and among which is the Mexican Juan Villoro, winner of the Recognition of Excellence 2022. In addition to the already traditional categories of Text, Coverage and Image, this year Audio and Photography were added.
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Gabriel García Márquez, 40 years after the Nobel Prize