The Spaniards Juan Bonilla and Rafael Chirbers alongside the Colombian Juan Gabriel Vasquez are the nominees for the first edition of the Biennial Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Award.
The Mario Vargas Llosa Chair announced Tuesday that Vasquez has been nominated for 'Las Reputaciones' (Alfaguara), while Bonilla and Chirbers were shortlisted for 'Prohibido entrar sin pantalones' (Seix Barral) and 'En la orilla' (Anagrama), respectively.
The winner will receive an award sculpture made by the acclaimed Peruvian plastic artist Fernando de Szyszlo and additional prize money of US$ 100,000. All three honorees will be recognized at a ceremony to be held at the Grand National Theater in Lima on March 27.
A total of 324 novels published in 2012 and 2013 by authors from seventeen Nationalities were considered for the award, which aims to become one of the most distinguished literary prizes of the Spanish-speaking world.
This year's judges are the Brazilian writer Nelida Pinon; the Director of the Royal Spanish Academy, Jose Manuel Blecua; scholars and critics Christopher Dominguez Michael from Mexico and David Gallagher from Chile and Marco Martos, President of the Peruvian Academy of Language.
The jury panel will be gathering in the capital city of Lima from March 25th through March 27th to evaluate the books of the final shortlist of nominees for selecting the winner.
Mario Vargas Llosa is Peru's most-honored living writer and the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. The book prize named after him expects to honor the best work of fiction published by a Spanish-speaking author within a two-year period.
(END) RRC/LOG
Published: 3/11/2014