Convened today by cultural institutions from Santiago, the Sleeping Bread Novel Award will be a tribute to the writer José Soler Puig, who won the first Casa de las Américas award in the genre
Promoted by the Provincial Book and Literature Center, Santiago Editions and the Center for Literary Promotion, its organizers emphasized that it is a way to disseminate and promote their work.
The contest will take place every two years and will admit Cuban authors, residents or not in the country, with unpublished or published novels that have not been awarded in previous contests.
Soler died in Santiago de Cuba on August 30, 1996, at the age of 78. He was awarded the National Prize for Literature and had a remarkable job as a scriptwriter for radio and TV.
The writer Eduardo Heras León expressed that, for manythe sleeping bread figure among the three top novels of Cuban literature, along with paradiseby José Lezama Lima, and Age of Enlightenmentby Alejo Carpentier.
The writer and essayist Aida Bahr, a profound connoisseur of his work, valued that narration as monumental.
The novel that gives the contest its title focuses on a middle-class family from Santiago during the tyranny of Gerardo Machado (1925-1933), in which the routine and mediocrity of a life marked by business based on bread making.
In the heat of the centenary of who was the first president of the Union of Writers and Artists (Uneac) in Santiago, a Colloquium in tribute to his memory, held in November 2016, managed to convene prestigious intellectuals in the city.
