Edmundo Paz Soldán

This name uses Spanish naming customs: the first or paternal family name is Paz-Soldán and the second or maternal family name is Ávila.
Edmundo Paz-Soldán

Paz Soldán, 2011
Born (1967-03-29)29 March 1967
Cochabamba,  Bolivia
Nationality Bolivian
Genre Novels, short stories, essays
Literary movement McOndo
Notable awards National Book Award (Premio Nacional de Novela, Bolivia)
2002
Juan Rulfo Prize
1997
Erich Guttentag prize
1991? 1992?

José Edmundo Paz-Soldán Ávila (Cochabamba, March 29, 1967) is a Bolivian writer.[1] His work is a prominent example of the Latin American literary movement known as McOndo, in which the magical realism of previous Latin American authors is supplanted by modern realism, often with a technological focus.[2][3][4] His work has won several awards.[1][5] He has lived in the United States since 1991,[6] and has taught literature at Cornell University since 1997.[6][7]

Career

Some early pieces were published while he was still at high school.[8] However, he started writing seriously at age 19 when he was in Buenos Aires, studying International Relations.[9][10] He transferred to the University of Alabama in Huntsville, receiving a football scholarship.[8] A year before graduating, his first collection of short stories, Las máscaras de la nada, was published in Cochabamba.[5][11]

He has resided in the United States since 1991.[6] He graduated B.A. in political science in 1991.[7] His first novel, Días de papel was a finalist in the 1991 Letras de Oro literary competition for United States works. The novel won the Erich Guttentag Prize,[1] and was published in 1992.

He obtained an M.A. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in 1993, and a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in 1997, both at University of California, Berkeley.[7][12] His Ph.D. thesis was on the life and works of Alcides Arguedas; stemming from this research, a biography was published in 2003.[8] He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.[5]

Río fugitivo (1998) is at one and the same time a Bildungsroman, a detective mystery novel, and a historico-political novel about Bolivia.[11][12][13]

Two of his novels have been translated into English.[14] La materia del deseo (1991)[15] was published in English (2004) as The Matter of Desire,[3] and El delirio de Turing was published in English as Turing's Delirium in 2006.[4][16] In Turing’s Delirium, Paz Soldán rewrote entire sequences directly in English for the translated edition, and changed the fundamental motivation of one of the characters; a subsequent Spanish version from Argentina incorporated these changes, but the widely circulated edition is the previous edition from Spain.[14]

In 2011, he became the first Bolivian to be published by Gallimard.[8] In 2011, he chaired the jury committee for the first Premio de las Américas for the best work published in Spanish in 2010.[17]

Norte, published in 2011, depicts three experiences of Latin American immigration to the US over an 80 year span.[18][19][20][21]

Billie Ruth was published in 2012.[22]

His first science fiction novel, Iris, published in 2014, was inspired by an article in Rolling Stone magazine about psychopathic soldiers in Afghanistan. The book was originally conceived as the last in a trilogy with Los vivos y los muertos (2009) and continued with Norte (2011); he had not initially intended it to be science fiction.[6][10][23]

He is cultural and political columnist for several newspapers and magazines: La Tercera, El País, The New York Times, Time and Etiqueta Negra. He has translated some English works to Spanish, including Much Ado About Nothing by Shakespeare and The Seller of Dreams by Ernesto Quiñonez, a US author from Ecuador. His own works have been translated into several languages and have appeared in anthologies in Europe and America. He teaches Latin American Literature at Cornell University.[7]

Reviewers have identified in his work a prominent example of the Latin American literary movement known as McOndo, which replaces the magical realism of previous Latin American authors with a technological, modernistic realism.[2][3][4] According to Mario Vargas Llosa, he is one of the most original among the new generation of Latin American authors.[24]

Works

Novels

Stories

Essays and critical analyses

Editor

Prizes and awards

Derived work

Two films by Alfonso Mayo, Wednesday Afternoon (2004) and Keeper of the Past (2005), are based on stories by Soldán.[27][28][29]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 José Edmundo Paz Soldán. Abanico, magazine of the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno, Argentina.
  2. 1 2 Paz Soldán destaca a nueva generación de autores bolivianos. El Universo. Aug 17, 2014
  3. 1 2 3 Schiller J. Bolivian Novelist Views Latin America Through Berkeley Eyes. Berkeley Daily Planet. Apr 27, 2004.
  4. 1 2 3 Lorenzo, O. Turing's Delirium. The Age. Aug 26, 2006
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Edmundo Paz Soldán, biografía. Alfaguara, Penguin Random House
  6. 1 2 3 4 Iris, nuevo libro de Edmundo Paz Soldán. La Republica (Peru). Feb 14, 2014.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Faculty Directory. Cornell University
  8. 1 2 3 4 Monroy RR. Encomio de Edmundo Paz Soldán. Los Tiempos. Cochabamba. Dec 5, 2011. Accessed April 28, 2015.
  9. Salmón J. Entrevista con Edmundo Paz Soldán. Revista Electrónica BRR. February 2002; volume 2: page 62. Accessed April 28, 2015.
  10. 1 2 3 4 Paz Soldán, un viaje literario desde Cochabamba hasta Iris. El Universal (Caracas). Sep 28, 2014.
  11. 1 2 Konstantinova I. Of Authors, Criminals, and Detectives: Metaphysical Detective (Meta)fiction in Edmundo Paz Soldán’s Río Fugitivo
  12. 1 2 Lazzarato F. Dalla Bolivia di Paz Soldán. Il manifesto. Feb 8, 2015.
  13. Bevilacqua D. Edmundo Paz Soldán - Río Fugitivo
  14. 1 2 Pérez-Duthie JC. The Edmundo Paz Soldán interview. The Quartery Conversation. March 5, 2012
  15. Bizzarri G. Reescribir Macondo: América Latina como "modelo para armar" en La materia del deseo de Edmundo Paz Soldán.
  16. Iyer, P. Virtual Unrest: Turing's Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldán. The New York Times. Jul 16, 2006.
  17. Chileno Arturo Fontaine gana el Premio de las Américas por la novela La vida doble. El Mercurio. May 8, 2011. Accessed April 28, 2015.
  18. Careaga R. Edmundo Paz Soldán retrata inmigración latina en Estados Unidos en su nueva novela. La Tercera. Jun 4, 2011.
  19. Amutio R. De Edmundo Paz Soldan. Le Figaro. Nov 14, 2014
  20. Monroy RR. Norte, de Edmundo Paz Soldán. Los Tiempos. Dec 3, 2011
  21. Interview with Canal-L de Barcelona, discussing "Norte"
  22. "Billie Ruth", lo nuevo de Edmundo Paz Soldán. Los Tiempos Dec 15, 2012
  23. Suau N. Iris. El Cultural. Jul 3, 2014
  24. Los vivos y los muertos. Alfaguara, Penguin Random House
  25. Ganadores de los premios literarios de la Semana Negra 2012. Semana Negra de Gijón. Accessed May 17, 2015.
  26. Paz Soldán, finalista a premio Celsius de novela ficción. Los Tiempos. Apr 4, 2015.
  27. Niccum J. Lawrence director honored. Lawrence Journal-World. Jun 10, 2005.
  28. Wednesday Afternoon. IMDb
  29. Keeper of the Past. IMDb

External links

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