Guadalajara — PassCol – Picture by vivamexicolindo.com. The Colombian writer Álvaro Mutis is the honor guest of the 21rst Book International Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico this month. The Fair will take place next November 24 to December 2 and is featuring Colombia as the guest country. The Colombian delegation will have the presence of Mutis, the also Nobel Prize 1982, Gabriel García Márquez and 50 other Colombian writers. Moroever, the South American country will have in the fair 50 publishing houses, 13 musician groups and other prominent Colombians of art and movie with their works.
“I still today remember that beauty in my Mexican exile, when I close the eyes and think in Colombia, in so extreme beauty, in that serenity of an Eden at the sixth day of the Creation, I find again that intact image”, said Mutis in a speech addressed to the Fair.
Álvaro Mutis was born in Bogotá in 1923, but he has been abroad most of the part of his life. First in Belgium until 1932 and after in Mexico since 1956. In his years in Colombia he worked as a journalist for Nuevo Mundo Broadcasting and as a public relation assistance in some companies. It was El Espectador the first newspaper to publish his poems before he moved to Mexico where he got influence from writers like Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Saint-John Perse and Walt Whitman. 1978 is marked as the beginning of his life as a writer of novels, but he published for the first time in 1986 “Maqroll el Naviero” (Maqroll the Shipping), his most popular work.
Mutis received the Literacy National Prize of Poetry of Colombia in 1974, the Medici Prize as the best foreign work of France in 1997, the Literacy Asturias Prince Prize of Spain in 1997 and the Cervantes Prize in 2001.
Sources
- Álvaro Mutis será homenajeado en la XXI FIL de Guadalajara. El Occidental, México, 24 de agosto de 2007.
- Discurso de Álvaro Mutis en la XXI Feria del Libro de Guadalajara, Viva Mexico Lindo.com, 25 de noviembre de 2007.