‘El Tercer Paraso’, the award-winning novel, connects the historical account of Chile with an intimate investigation. Receive a prize of 145,000 euros.
The Chilean writer and journalist Cristian Alarcn has been chosen as the winner of the XXV Alfaguara Novel Prize thanks to the third paradise, a story in which the stories of Chile and Argentina are entangled with the story intimate of a character who takes refuge in nature to decipher his memory. Alarcón will receive 175,000 dollars (145,300 euros) for the prize.
“I have been a journalist all my life. I have always struggled with journalism and literature. I have written about young thieves, about the Peruvian drug war in Buenos Aires. Now I have rediscovered another topic, the deep relationship many of us have with nature. It is an adventure for everyone and it is a form of knowledge. This time I indulged in the creation of an artifact that has a double face. One part is an American family novel,” explained Alarcón upon receiving the award. The other part searches through lost history for Alarcón’s two countries, Chile and Argentina, with special emphasis on the 1960s and 1970s of Allende, the earthquake and Pinochet’s coup.
Alarcón is known, above all, as editor of essay magazines Anfibia Y Red Harvest, published from Buenos Aires. His previous books When I die I want them to play cumbia for me Y If you want me, you want to have sex, were non-fiction pieces on urban and youth conflicts and violence, chronicles with a literary vocation. His first novel seems, more than a change of genre, an extension of his creative freedom: “I have seen myself creating an object that does not necessarily obey the logic of reality.”
Fernando Aramburu, president of the Alfaguara Award jury, highlighted the “concise, exact and refined prose” of the third paradise and its “narrative vigour”.TogetherAramburu has been part of the jury Ray Loriga, Paula Vzquez, Olga Merino and the editor Pilar Reyes.
According to the criteria of
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