The Cuban writer and professor Jorge Luis Arcos, resident in Argentina, was the winner of the 2023 Franz Kafka Essay/Testimony Award with his unpublished The penalty [Relato caleidoscópico]. The result was announced by the digital platform inCUBAdora, which described the work as “a fundamental contribution” to the knowledge of the author and member of the Grupo Orígenes Lorenzo García Vega.
According to the jury, made up of researchers Nancy Calomarde, Nanne Timmer and Pablo de Cuba, the work “puts into circulation the valuable archive that brings together the communications, documents and emails between Lorenzo García Vega and other writers and critics interested in his work.” .
In addition, Arcos’s book has an extraordinary “literary and documentary quality” and “interrogates the bases of the construction of the canon and the reading devices”, carrying out, they affirm, a transformation in the way in which literature has been read up to now. Cuban as well as Latin American.
Regarding the shape and style of The penalty It has a “polyphonic, diverse and heterogeneous” character. It is a “passionate dialogue” that, from the figure of García Vega, asks questions about the “limits of literature and its future challenges”.
InCubadora, which took advantage of the news to congratulate its winner, will publish and circulate the book, both in paper and electronic format, in the second half of this year
InCubadora, which took advantage of the news to congratulate its winner, will publish and circulate the book, both in print and in electronic format, in the second half of this year.
Arcos, born in Havana in 1956, is one of the most prominent critics of the Island and a professor at the National University of Río Negro, in Argentina. He is author of The unitive solution (1960) –one of the classic essays on the poetic thought of José Lezama Lima–, The poetics of Lorenzo García Vega (2012) and Origins, radiant poverty (1994).
Together with Enrique Saínz, also an essayist, he was director of the literary magazine Unión. He also collaborated with History of Cuban literature published in three volumes by the Havana Institute of Literature and Linguistics. Likewise, since he went into exile in Madrid in 2004, he was one of the most active editors of the magazine Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana, founded by the novelist Jesús Díaz in 1996.
The winning books of the Franz Kafka Prize, which in 2022 the actress Lynn Cruz deserved for her book blue Chronicle, They are, according to the rules of the contest, distributed in the “network of independent libraries” of the Island and other “non-state” organizations.
In the Novel section, writers such as Ahmel Echevarría, Raúl Flores Iriarte or Frank Correa have been awarded prizes in other years. InCUBadora, the platform that organizes the prize, was founded by the Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Aguilera, who lives in Prague.
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