Madrid (EFE).- The Cordovan writer and playwright Antonio Gala, who died on May 28 at the age of 92, has been honored today at the Madrid Book Fair in an act where he has been remembered as the generator of the ” longest lines” of this appointment, as well as the artist who “looked to the future” and who had the gift of “knowing how to listen”.
Under the title of “Remembering Gala”, friends such as the journalist Nativel Preciado, the writers Joaquín Pérez Azaustre and María Zaragoza, and Françoise Dubosquet, author of the monograph Antonio “Gala, un regard les années 80” (1989), have revived the spirit of the Cordovan writer in a morning where Gala has been spoken of in the present, not in the past.
Preciado, who met him when he was 18 years old, has recounted how their first meeting was in an interview where Gala was surprised at his youth: “he was a wise man, he was not a media figure. Of all the great creators I have known, he is the character who knew how to listen best, especially to women. He had a special perception to value what others did not value ”.
Recounting the intimate and profound experience
But he has also extolled how Gala “opened a fundamental path, telling the intimate, personal, profound experience, in a press article.”
A “facet so sincere, so torn, that it is a journalistic exercise that many have tried to imitate and it is impossible”, he has qualified.
During the ceremony held this Friday, Francisco Moreno, president of the Antonio Gala Foundation, also spoke to praise the figure of Gala as the creator of the foundation that bears his name, “his most beloved work.” An institution where more than 300 creators from all artistic disciplines have passed since its creation in 2002.
His way of understanding Andalusia
And precisely two of his former students, the writers Joaquín Pérez and María Zaragoza, have highlighted, respectively, “his open way of understanding Andalusia as a rich, permeable territory, that Andalusia that he helped to build”, as well as his “generosity” and his ” look to the future”.
Likewise, Eva Orúe, director of the Madrid Fair, has reminded the Gala that the longest queues at this event were disputed with Arturo Pérez Reverte, which he stopped attending in 2010.
The event, moderated by Ana Gavín, director of editorial relations for Grupo Planeta and vice-president of the Antonio Gala Foundation, was also attended by José María Gala García, director of the Foundation and nephew of the honoree.
And it has ended with the reading of some of his poets by the hand of some of the artists he awarded scholarships, such as the writer Dimas Prychyslyy, who has stated that they have the “obligation” to “defend” the legacy of the author of works such as “The Crimson Manuscript”, whose rights have been sold to become audiovisual productions.