MADRID, Spain.- Cuban journalist Carlos Manuel Álvarez won the 2022 Sergio González Rodríguez Anagrama Chronicle Award for his work intruders, whose common thread tells the story of the quartering of the San Isidro Movement in November 2020 in Cuba. The award, endowed with 10,000 euros, was delivered during the 36th edition of the Guadalajara International Book Fair.
As defined by the author himself from his profile of Facebook, intruders is a “mixture of reportage, testimony, profile and memory” and “portrays the lives of the participants in a civic protest that seems to have irreversibly changed the sentimental political map of the Island, and also, around those dates, your experience intimate with the Cuban Stasi as part of the social maelstrom shared by that dissident group”.
“At the same time,” adds Álvarez, “I explore some categories: revolution, dictatorship, language, totalitarianism, and I try to place the thought and the story of the book on the following axis: we are not victims who suffer from Orwellian repression of manners, nor actors subject to the closed framework of the Cold War, but individuals who fight and star in another possible conflict of modernity and its truncated horizons”.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper The country, Carlos Manuel Álvarez stated that receiving this award is “comforting” and considered that “the awards always bring a dose of enthusiasm that is necessary to oxygenate after the solidarity exercise of writing”; as well as they constitute “a direct retribution, relatively easy to measure, of the resonance that your work has outside”.
For its part, the aforementioned outlet indicated that the jury of the fourth edition of the Anagrama Prize considered the chronicle of the writer “a detailed exercise of observation on the current political situation in Cuba, which is intertwined with a reflection on the role of journalism, the writing and art.
The jury was made up of the Mexican journalist Juan Villoro, the Argentine chronicler Leila Guerriero, the Argentine writer Martín Caparrós, the editor Silvia Sesé and José Javier Villarreal, Secretary of Extension and Culture of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León. Forty original works from ten countries were presented to this edition.
Carlos Manuel Álvarez was selected by the magazine granted among the best young narrators in Spanish last year. He has published the novels The fallen (2018) and fake war (2021) and the collection of journalistic chronicles, The tribe: Portraits of Cuba.
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