Leonardo Padura Princess wins Asturias prize – ElHeraldo.hn

Spain.

“Shaken but enormously happy,” said she Cuban writer and journalist Leonardo Padura, being distinguished yesterday the Princess of Asturias Award for Letters.

The author, known for his series of detective novels featuring the detective Mario Conde, said in a statement, “I want to express my enormous gratitude for this that give me great honor and I assume in recognition of many years of work, full of uncertainties, doubts and fears of the creation, “adding” fills me with satisfaction and pride as a human being, as a writer, as a Cuban ” .

As reflected in the minutes, which was read out by the director of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), Dario Villanueva, Padura is an author “rooted in its tradition and resolutely contemporary; an inquirer of the cultured and the popular; an independent intellectual, ethical firm temperament. ” The jury highlighted the interest of the writer “to hear the voices and lost popular stories of others … From fiction, Padura shows the challenges and limits on the search for truth. Impeccable exploration of the history and ways of telling “.

Each of the Princess of Asturias awards, created in 1981, is endowed with 50,000 euros ($ 56.150) and a sculpture designed by the artist Joan Miró. The awards will be presented in October in Oviedo.

About the Author

Born in Havana in 1955 , city where he still resides, Padura worked as a writer, journalist and critic to achieve international recognition with a series of detective novels featuring the detective Mario Conde.

Thanks to books like “Past Perfect”, “Winds of Lent”, “Masks”, “Autumn Landscape”, “Goodbye, Hemingway,” “The fog of yesterday” or “The tail of the snake,” Cuban writer won the Café Gijón prize Hammett in 1995 and three times (1997, 1998 and 2005).

In 2012 received the National Prize for Literature in Cuba. Besides starring Mario Conde series Padura has also written “The novel of my life” and “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” a reconstruction of the lives of Trotsky and Ramon Mercader.

“Heretics,” an absorbing novel about a painting by Rembrandt and a Jewish saga that reaches our days, placed him on the map as one of the most ambitious Spanish-language and international storytellers, a condition that has come to be confirmed with this award.