Vargas Llosa and Cuban Leonardo Padura will open the Escridores literary festival in Spain

A dialogue between the Nobel Prize for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa and the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura will open the Escridores literary festival on February 22 in Malaga (south), in this second edition.

The festival will have France as the guest country of honor and will present its Writers Award for Cultural Management to Raúl Padilla, founder and current president of the Guadalajara International Book Fair (Mexico), and the Literary Career Award, posthumously , to the recently deceased Brazilian writer Nélida Piñón.

Writers was born”with the spirit of connecting the two shores through the Atlantic, of twinning Europe and America with culture and literature, of encouraging debate and dialogue and of contributing to the creation of citizenship through critical thinking”, recalled this Monday in the presentation Raúl Tola, director of the festival and of the Vargas Llosa Chair, one of the organizers.

France was chosen as the guest country for being “one of the greatest literary powers in the world” and how “magnificent prelude to the incorporation of Vargas Llosa to the French AcademyTola added.

The Spanish Manuel Vilas, Pilar Adón, Inés Martín Rodrigo, Luis Mateo Díez or Juan Tallón will also participate in the festival; the Mexicans Jordi Soler, Jorge Hernández, Marisol Schulz and David Toscana; the Argentine Martín Caparrós and the Cuban Zoe Valdés.

Other confirmed attendees are the Peruvians Renato Cisneros and Santiago Roncagliolo, and the Venezuelans Gustavo Guerrero and Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, while the Chilean writer Isabel Allende will intervene virtually.

Representing the invited country will be the French authors David Foenkinos, Mathias Enard and Maylis de Kerangal, as well as the journalist, novelist and biographer Pierre Assouline.

The festival will be held from February 22 to 25, and will turn Andalusia, the region where it is celebrated, “into the epicenter of literature in our language and a communication hinge between two traditions such as the European and Latin American,” according to Tola.

Source: EFE