Miami-FL- January 24th, 2020 - Mexican author Guillermo Arriaga has been awarded the Premio Alfaguara de novela 2020 / 2020 Alfaguara Novel Prize for his work Salvar el fuego / Saving the Fire.
Miami-FL- January 24th, 2020 - Mexican author Guillermo Arriaga has been awarded the Premio Alfaguara de novela 2020 / 2020 Alfaguara Novel Prize for his work Salvar el fuego / Saving the Fire. The prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize offers a prize of $175,000 and a sculpture by artist Martín Chirino.
The novel which the author submitted under a different title and under the pseudonym “Isabella Montini”, was awarded by a jury comprised of authors Juan Villoro (Mexico), as president of the jury, Laura Alcoba (Argentina) and Edurne Portela (Spain), poet and journalist Antonio Lucas (Spain), editor and bookseller Jesús Trueba (Spain), and Pilar Reyes (given a voice but not a counting vote), director of the Alfaguara imprint; and was selected by a unanimous decision.
Of the 602 contending manuscripts in this 22nd edition of the Alfaguara Novel Prize, 281 were sent from Spain, 94 were received from Argentina, 86 from Mexico, 57 from Colombia, 32 from the United States, 19 from Chile, 18 from Uruguay, and 15 from Peru.
The winning novel will arrive at the bookstores on May 19th. in the US.
Salvar el fuego / Saving the Fire
The jury highlighted that Salvar el fuego / Saving the Fire “is a polyphonic novel that narrates, with intensity and with exceptional vitality and vigor, a history of violence in contemporary Mexico where love and redemption are still possible. The author uses both an extraordinary visual force and the recreation and reinvention of colloquial language to achieve a work of great credibility. The different narrative planes use the human body as their conductive liaison, which offers reasons for celebration and exposed excesses.”
Marina, a married woman and mother of three, with a conventional and organized family life, is a choreographer of a certain prestige, and gets involved in an unlikely affair with an unthinkable man. Saving the Fire portrays two Mexico’s completely different from each other, in which Marina, who is part of the highest social class, is linked to a man considered to be at the extreme bottom of society.
Saving the Fire is a novel that portrays the contradictions of a country as well as human nature’s deepest contradictions. This is a love story; it is a novel which at the end, offers much hope.
Guillermo Arriaga is a Mexican author, screenwriter, director, and producer. He has published the novels Escuadrón Guillotina / Guillotine Squad (1991), Un dulce olor a muerte / Sweet Scent of Death (1994), El búfalo de la noche / The Night Buffalo (1999), and El Salvaje / The Savage (2016), Premio Mazatlán de Literatura 2017 for the best book of the year, and the collection of short stories Retorno 201 / Return 201 (2006); his works have been translated into eighteen different languages. He wrote the screenplays for the multi-award winning movies “Amores perros”, “21 Grams”, and “Babel”, which make up “The Death Trilogy” that opted for a non-linear narrative and that reflects the theme of death, and for “Los tres entierros de Melquiades Estrada / The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada”, which received the 2005 Cannes Best Screenplay Award. In 2008 he made his debut as a movie director with The Burning Plain, and recently he produced and co-wrote “Desde allá”, the first Latin American film that has won the León de Oro at the Venice Film Festival.
