Leonardo Padura has won the International Award for Black Novel Pepe Carvalhowhich is awarded to recognize a career within the genre within the framework of the 18th edition of the BCNegra festival, which will take place in Barcelona until next Sunday.
The writer Claudia Piñeiro has been chosen to open the envelope and announce the name of the winner, according to a report from the agency efe.
And the Pepe Carvalho Award 2023 is for a…
?Leonardo Padura, Cuban writer, journalist and screenwriter.
Congratulations!? pic.twitter.com/61riOdLVHL
— Barcelona Literature (@bcnliteratura) February 6, 2023
Recently arrived from Cuba, Padura will offer a press conference tomorrow before receiving the award next Thursday in a formal ceremony in the Gothic Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Hall.
In a brief intervention, Padura expressed his joy at receiving the news live from his “colleague and friend” Claudia Piñeiro, and announced that “as a good disciplined person” he has prepared “six double-spaced pages” in which he thanks and remembers “the memory of two people who have been significant for BCNegra and detective literature, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and the bookseller Paco Camarasa, inspirational and first curator of the festival”.
“Three years ago I received the Barcino Historical Novel Prize in Barcelona and it was significant and encouraging that in the justification of the prize it was said that I was deserving for the transparency of time, for chronicling the Cuban present just like the one Vázquez Montalbán did with the Spain of the moment, that is to say that history reaches us”, he said.
Of his friendship with Vázquez Montalbán, Padura has said that “one of the best methods to make people talk is not torture, but accompanying him with three bottles of rum, and he always did.”
The Deputy Mayor for Culture of Barcelona, Jordi Martí, pointed out that “the Barcino Historical Novel Prize surely had a lot to do with the novel ‘The man who loved dogs’, but the name of Leonardo Padura is definitely associated with the black novel” through the character of Mario Conde.
Martí has promised the winner that these days at the BCNegra they will open some bottles of rum and try to start a police investigation to find out who has the book lost by Padura.
Padura: “The option of exile is not the one that can guide Cuba”
In previous editions, they won the Pepe Carvalho Don Winslow, Joyce Carol OatesJuan Madrid, James Ellroy, Claudia Piñeiro, Dennis Lehane, Andrea Camilleri, Petros Márkaris, Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly or Henning Mankell.
In addition to Padura and Piñeiro, Petros Márkaris, Juan Gómez-Jurado, Rosa Ribas, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Dominique Manotti, Dolores Redondo, Lorenzo Silva, Antonio Manzini, Laura Lippman, Margarida Aritzeta, Jon Bilbao, Pilar Adon, Ginés Sánchez, Rafael Vallbona or Dror Mishani.
Efe/OnCuba.
