Leopoldo Brizuela was Awarded the 2012 Alfaguara Novel Prize for Una misma noche
MIAMI, March 26, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Santillana USA -- Argentine author Leopoldo Brizuela was awarded the 2012 Alfaguara Novel Prize consisting of 175,000 dollars (approximately euro 133,306) and a sculpture by Martin Chirino for his work Una misma noche, submitted under the title La repeticion and the penname Pickwick.
The jury, presided by Rosa Montero and composed by Montxo Armendariz, Lluis Morral, Jurgen Dormagen, Antonio Orejudo, and Pilar Reyes (given voice, but not vote), selected the winner by majority vote.
785 original manuscripts were received for this 15th edition of the Alfaguara Novel Prize, the highest-volume participation in the history of the Prize. Of the 785 contending manuscripts, 307 were sent from Spain, 143 were received from Argentina, 108 from Mexico, 47 from Colombia, 31 from the United States, 25 from Chile, 25 from Ecuador, 23 from Peru, and 16 from Costa Rica, Panama and Nicaragua. 14 manuscripts originated in Uruguay, 12 in Guatemala and Honduras, 9 in El Salvador, 8 in Venezuela, 8 in Bolivia, 5 in the Dominican Republic, and 4 in Paraguay.
Una misma noche tells the story of Leonardo Diego Bazan, a middle-aged writer who returns to his childhood home to care for his widowed mother. Unwittingly, he witnesses the robbery of a neighboring house. The robbery, carried out by a group of police officers, brings back repressed memories of a time when the house was occupied by the Kupermans. It was 1976 and Argentina was under military dictatorship. A 13-year old Leonardo witnesses a similar incident and buries the memory along with the role his father played in the event. Over thirty years later, he sets out to write a novel in an attempt to free himself of a past he's been unable to forget. His investigation focuses on the figure of Diana Kuperman, a woman who was psychologically tortured by the regime of that time. A constant dialogue between the years of 2010 and 1976, the story acts as a catalyst of one of the darkest periods in the history of Argentina and echoes, with no intent to oversimplify, the voices of both, victims and executioners.
Leopoldo Brizuela was born in 1963 in La Plata; Buenos Aires, Argentina. He studied Literature at the Universidad de La Plata. Narrator, poet and translator, his first novel, Tejiendo agua, written when he was 17 years old, won the Fortabat Award in 1985. Inglaterra. Una fabula was awarded the Clarin Novel Prize in 1999 as well as the Premio Municipal de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Translated into various languages by prestigious publishing houses, the novel received remarkable reviews from international media outlets such as Le Monde, El Pais and La Folha de Sao Paulo. Brizuela is also the author of the nouvelle El placer de la cautiva (2001), the book of short stories Los que llegamos mas lejos (Alfaguara 2002) and the novel Lisboa. Un melodrama (Alfaguara Argentina, 2010; Alianza, 2010), among other works. He has translated Henry James, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, among other writers. He was a Resident Writer at the Banff Center For the Arts, in Canada, at the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, and was the recipient of a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon for the study of the Portuguese culture. He contributes regularly with the newspapers Clarin and La Nacion, and coordinates creative writing workshops.
The Alfaguara Novel Prize has become a benchmark for quality literary awards given to unpublished works written in Spanish. Its prestige throughout the Spanish-speaking guarantees the winning work's international distribution, supported by simultaneous publishing in Spain, Latin America, and the United States. To date, the winners of the Alfaguara Novel Prize are Caracol Beach by Eliseo Alberto and Margarita, esta linda la mar by Sergio Ramirez (winners both of the first edition of the Prize), Son de Mar by Manuel Vicent, Ultimas noticias del paraiso by Clara Sanchez, La piel del cielo by Elena Poniatowska, El vuelo de la reina by Tomas Eloy Martinez, Diablo Guardian by Xavier Velasco, Delirio by Laura Restrepo, El turno del escriba by Graciela Montes and Ema Wolf, Abril rojo by Santiago Roncagliolo, Mira si yo te querre by Luis Leante, Chiquita by Antonio Orlando Rodriguez, El viajero del siglo by Andres Neuman, El arte de la resurreccion by Hernan Rivera Letelier, and El ruido de las cosas al caer by Juan Gabriel Vasquez.
The winners enjoy a one-year promotional tour that takes them to almost all Spanish-speaking countries in various continents. In addition, the winning novel is distributed simultaneously in 19 Spanish-speaking countries, reaching an audience of over 400 million.
For general information, visit www.prisaediciones.com/us . Friend us on Facebook at Santillana USA & Puerto Rico and follow as @librosenespanol.
SOURCE Santillana USA
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