This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Central America, Sweden, and Argentina. A poetry festival featuring Latin American heavy hitters has just wrapped up in Guatemala, where, in addition, a new YA title draws from a military coup and a reprint tackles guerrilla warfare; Sweden’s most prestigious literary prize has been awarded in the fiction, non-fiction, and children’s book categories, and the Swedish Arts Council is trying to keep the literary sector afloat; a series of sundry voices gathered at a non-fiction festival in Argentina, where they spoke about how hard it is to narrate the pandemic—and how easy it is to honor another viral phenomenon. Read on to find out more!
José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America
Guatemala just finished the sixteenth edition of the celebrated Festival Internacional de Poesía de Quetzaltenango (FIPQ). As a virtual festival, it included readings and presentations of notorious poets including Cesar Augusto Carvalho (Brasil), Isabel Guerrero (Chile), Yousif Alhabob (Sudan), Rosa Chavez (Guatemala), and Raúl Zurita (Chile). Relive FIPQ’s closing ceremony with a performance of the Guatemalan indie-pop band, Glass Collective, here.
Guatemalan novelist and translator David Unger just put out a new YA book. Called Sleeping with the Light On, it is based on how the author and his family experienced the 1954 US-backed military coup, which overthrew the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz. Sleeping with the Light On (Groundwood Books) is illustrated by Carlos Aguilera.
Finally, before the end of the year Catafixia Editorial will reissue two essential books of Guatemalan history and literature, Yolanda Colom’s Mujeres en la alborada and Eugenia Gallardo’s No te apresures en llegar a la Torre de Londres porque la Torre de Londres no es el Big Ben.
Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden
The most prestigious prize for Swedish literature, the August Prize, is announced in November each year. Usually a fancy gala in Stockholm, the celebration was hosted online this year by editor, translator, and journalist Yukiko Duke and writer and psychologist Jenny Jägerfeld. Named after writer and painter August Strindberg, internationally best known for his modernist plays, the prize was instituted by the Swedish Publishers’ Association in 1989 to highlight newly published books in Swedish each year. The prize is comprised of three categories: Best Swedish Fiction Book of the Year; Best Swedish Non-Fiction Book of the Year; and Best Swedish Children’s Book of the Year. A jury for each category nominates six titles, announced in October. These books are then read by 21 electors for each category. These are from different parts of Sweden, one third of them being booksellers, one third librarians, and one third literary critics and others. The award consists of a bronze statuette by artist Mikael Fare and 100,000 SEK. This year’s winner in the fiction category is Lydia Sandgren for her debut novel about love, friendship and literature. Elin Anna Labba is the winner of the non-fiction category, awarded for her book on the Swedish forced migrations of the Sami people. The children’s book category was won by Kristina Sigunsdotter and Ester Eriksson for a book that mixes existential angst with humor.
Other parts of the Swedish literary scene are also receiving monetary payments in the form of government financial support administered by the Swedish Arts Council in the hope to save activities and jobs in the cultural sector following the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the recipients are several publishing companies as well as Gothia Towers, the exhibition space that hosts the annual Gothenburg Book Fair, and Astrid Lindgren’s World, an event park based on Astrid Lindgren’s children’s books.
Josefina Massot, Blog Editor, reporting from Argentina
True to its brief but already established history, Argentine non-fiction festival Basado en Hechos Reales (Based on True Events) delivered a motley fourth edition last weekend: there were panels, workshops, and award ceremonies helmed by lauded journalists, authors, philosophers, musicians, and filmmakers on both sides of the Equator and the proverbial pond. Their topics of discussion were just as varied, and yet—whether explicitly or not—they all touched upon the current crisis at some point.
You’d expect the event of the century to have inspired them. As writer and journalist Martín Caparrós put it to colleague Ana Basualdo, “We’re all experiencing a very intense phenomenon at the same time, which is rare and should favor storytelling.” And yet, in a gesture of humility that must have soothed several viewers’ creative anxieties, he and others focused on what they haven’t been able to write. “We can barely do anything, and it’s hard to narrate inaction; that’s why there haven’t been any great stories”—at least not beyond straight-up reporting from the front lines.
Like Caparrós, New Yorker staff writers D.T. Max and Susan Orlean (better known as the author of The Orchid Thief) mentioned the importance of breaking-news journalism. “I stayed glued to my TV and phone reading the news for the first two months of the pandemic,” said Orlean, commending many reporters’ courage and enterprise at a time when “people aren’t free to explore and learn for themselves.” On a more personal note, however, she and Max lamented their own inability to go out into the field and conduct personal interviews. “I cannot report through Zoom the way I can report when I’m there with the person,” said Max; “the interaction isn’t the same.” Others seemed to struggle not with confined space but with infinite time: “if I have nothing to do,” Mexican Juan Villoro admitted to Pedro Mairal, “I start getting anxious and squandering that free time.”
Mairal himself has been able to write a few pieces on this year’s events but has not fared as well with his fiction: “I’ve found it impossible to come up with something more striking than what’s actually happening. We’re already stuck in a dystopian novel.” Later, in conversation with author Martín Kohan and philosopher Ivana Costa, Ricardo Romero spoke of his own break from fiction and his stabs at something like a diary of the pandemic, which—like so many others worldwide—he’s chosen to share online. Now that most public spectacles have been cancelled for sanitary reasons, he argued, we’ve made a spectacle of our private lives. Kohan agreed but refused to partake: he’s not interested in such experiments, and posits intimacy as a form of resistance.
Speakers on the festival’s closing panel switched gears and focused on all the ways in which they could write about a different phenomenon, one arguably as viral as the pandemic—Diego Armando Maradona. The world-class footballer’s passing a little over two weeks ago merited this late addition to the program: he wasn’t (isn’t!) just a legend in his country or the world of sports, but a go-to in the world of literature. “I’ve never written so much about the same subject in such a short period of time,” said sports journalist Ezequiel Fernández Moores. “He’s the imperfect hero, the perfect narrative subject.” Juan Villoro returned to pay him homage, adding to his colleague’s musings: “Diego was his own mythographer; his catchphrases are legion” (even readers unfamiliar with the sporting great will likely know about “the Hand of God”). And he closed with a wonderfully evocative statement, one that managed to weave the festival’s two underlying threads together: “It’s no coincidence that he passed away at a time when stadiums are closed; they’ve become mausoleums, as if they could anticipate his funeral.”
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