Casa de América and the Embassy of Peru in Spain, along with RTVE, are organizing a dialogue in memory of Bryce Echenique, the Peruvian writer who passed away last March, next Monday, May 25 at 7 PM in the Ambassadors’ Hall of the diplomatic cultural center (access via Plaza de Cibeles, s/n).
The author of A World for Julius was awarded the FIL Prize for Literature in 2012 and is considered the last survivor of the Latin American novel boom.
Alfredo Bryce Echenique, who passed away on March 10, was one of the most singular, luminous, and irreverent voices in Spanish-language narrative, whose work has profoundly marked contemporary Latin American literature. Author of essential titles such as A World for Julius, The Exaggerated Life of Martín Romaña or The Garden of My Beloved, Bryce Echenique built an unmistakable literary universe in which irony, melancholy, and humor coexist with a sharp gaze on memory, love, and human fragility. His writing, deeply oral and vitalistic, turned the everyday into a narrative matter of great emotional intensity.
Linked to Spain during long periods of his life, Bryce maintained a close relationship with the Madrid cultural ecosystem and with literary institutions that, for decades, have recognized his central place within the so-called Latin American boom. He was already honored at Casa de América within the framework of the Author’s Week, a cycle dedicated to essential figures of contemporary Hispanic American literature, where his work was celebrated alongside that of authors such as Ernesto Sabato, Mario Vargas Llosa, or Roberto Bolaño.
Casa de América, the Embassy of Peru in Spain, and RTVE are organizing the first tribute dedicated to his figure and his work, with the aim of recovering not only the writer but also the narrator of the vital experience, the author who made nostalgia, humor, and emotional excess a way of understanding the world. His literature, permeated by a unique and recognizable voice, continues to engage with new generations of readers who find in it a mix of lucidity, tenderness, and boldness.
At the event, a tribute video to Bryce Echenique made by RTVE will be screened, and subsequently, a dialogue will take place featuring César Ferreira, professor at the Peruvian Academy of Language and the American Academy of the Spanish Language at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Carlos Franz, writer and essayist; Elena Torres, writer, and Jorge Eduardo Benavides, novelist, short story writer, and cultural journalist.