Madrid (EFE).- The Nobel Prize for Literature and Peruvian Hispanic writer Mario Vargas Llosa has assured this Tuesday that in Latin America writers are not as frowned upon as they were 30 years ago and that, on some occasions, they receive prizes, although other times They kick them out, in reference to the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez.
Vargas Llosa (Arequipa, Peru, 1936) has been honored this afternoon at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid in an act curated by the Sergio Ramírez Cervantes Prize winner and in which the first part of a work that compiles six decades of journalistic production has been presented of the writer, in this case the first volume dedicated to culture and, especially, to literary criticism.
In a talk with the writers Carlos Granés (Colombia), editor and prologue writer of the first volume of this work, “The fire of imagination: books, stages, screens and museums” (2023), and Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), moderated by the editor Pilar Reyes, Vargas Llosa has recalled his beginnings as a writer and has assured that he does not recognize himself in the first articles that make up this book.
This book, of about eight hundred pages, represents a journey by the writer on the literary creation of the 20th century and so far in the 21st, through articles that date from his time as a beginner reader in Lima to his 20 years.
“I don’t recognize many of the texts because they were written a long time ago and others defend positions that are no longer mine, but at the same time it constitutes the story of a writer. That rich, contradictory, complicated past is fundamental, in which there are very contradictory articles and which, however, read now, recall certain episodes in the history of Peru and Latin America that are inevitable”, Vargas Llosa has indicated.
Vargas Llosa and Borges
The Nobel Prize for Literature has explained how he began to write very young, in a newspaper when he was still at school, and how difficult it was in Peru at the time to access the literature of other countries, since it was very isolated.
“I remember very well the first time I heard about Borges”, with whom he has confessed that he has had a conflictive relationship: “Then I was a member of the Communist Party, and Borges represented everything that communism hated: he did not believe in reality, nor in social problems, he wrote inspired by classic books about exotic worlds”, which is why he had to read it at night already hidden.
He has also recounted that “if one wanted to be a writer, one had to leave Peru, where no one made a living like that”, and he recalled that his dream was to go to Paris, a city where upon arrival he bought a copy of a book that changed his life: “Madame Bovary”: “Flaubert gave me the passion for the novel and the conviction of being a writer”, he has indicated.
Changes in the situation of authors in Latin America
Regarding the situation of the authors, now, he has indicated, things have changed in Latin America, where “there is a grim right wing made up largely of the military and writers are given prizes” and where a “sinister” character like Daniel Ortega , the Nicaraguan president, gives prizes” to some writers, while he kicks others out, he said in reference to Sergio Ramírez, whose nationality has been withdrawn.
For his part, Ramírez has stated that “much of the drama in Latin America has been that freedom was good for some but not for all” and, today, there is still “a certain left that does not recognize dictatorships.”
The first volume of Vargas Llosa’s journalistic and essay work on literature and art will be followed by others on Peru, the troubled regions in the world, the challenges of today’s society and a more personal fifth on trips and characters that have influenced in the writer, all of them published by Alfaguara.
In the tribute to Vargas Llosa and his work, Spanish writers and Latin American writers residing in Madrid, such as Rosa Montero, Héctor Abad Facilone, Gioconda Belli or Jorge Eduardo Benavides, participated for two days.