For managing to communicate the wisdom of the past with the dilemmas of today with her delicate and powerful writing, Irene Vallejo will receive the Nuevo León Alfonso Reyes Prize awarded by the state Secretariat of Culture, Conarte, Tec de Monterrey, UDEM, UANL and U-ERRE.
The author of The Infinity in a Junco will receive the award next Tuesday at 12:00 p.m., at the Government Palace.
The next day, the philologist and essayist will also hold a dialogue in the Great Hall of the City Theater, at 5:00 p.m., in addition to subsequent meetings with the university community.
Both events will be open to the public with free admission.
Vallejo joins the list made up of writers Margo Glantz, Donna J. Haraway, Cristina Rivera Garza, Luisa Valenzuela and Rosa Beltrán, who have received the award since its creation in 2020.
“The great Spanish writer and essayist, Irene Vallejo, a prominent classical philologist, is an author who has managed to bring the Greco-Latin world and the history of books to a mass audience,” said Ricardo Marcos, technical secretary of Conarte.
“His style is characterized by his ability to combine historical rigor and references to classic authors with reflections on the present and a passionate defense of reading and culture as essential goods.”
For El infiniti en un junco (Siruela, 2019), the writer won the 2020 National Essay Award.
Vallejo becomes the first award-winning writer who will speak with the students of the four most important universities in Nuevo León.
At the end of the month, the first of three installments – one for each year – of the Conarte 30 Years Commemorative Collection will be published, with the reissue of 10 emblematic titles by Monterrey writers, some already deceased.
Academics and authors such as Pedro de Isla, Ana Laura Santamaría, Armando Pulido, Irasema Corpus, Humberto Salazar and Ingrid Bringas made up the selection committee, coordinated by the literary critic Víctor Barrera Enderle.
“We cannot say that (the Collection) is a literary canon, but it is a definition of the authors who have identified us in recent decades,” said Melissa Segura, state Secretary of Culture.
“Many of them were published by Conarte in the beginning, others have won awards, but all of them are representatives of the literature of Nuevo León.”
The presentation of the collection will be on Tuesday, December 2, at 3:30 p.m., at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, then the books will be available in Conarte and Fondo Editorial Nuevo León bookstores.
The first titles in the collection are:
– The murder of Paulina Lee
Hugo Valdes
– The need to understand
Alejandra Rangel
– The soft angles
Dulce María González
– The darkest night
Eduardo Antonio Parra
– Advance in retreat (Poetic Anthology 1988-2022)
Eduardo Zambrano
– Dramaatonement
Hernan Galindo
– Sero Chronicle
Joaquin Hurtado
– Hervor de riel
Mario Antaeus
– Thalamus
Minerva Margarita Villarreal
– The gigantic one
Patricia Laurent Kullick
The poets Anna Gual, author of Vaso Roto Ediciones, and Gioconda Belli, also a novelist and essayist, will be at the 30th edition of the Conarte International Writers’ Meeting, from Thursday, November 27 to Saturday, November 29.
“City and memory” will be this year’s theme, the same as three decades ago, when this meeting was founded.
“This underlines the importance of literature as an archive of urban experience and as a record of social and physical transformations of the environment,” said writer Pedro de Isla, director of Casa de la Cultura Nuevo León, headquarters of the literary guild of the decentralized organization.
“We think that reflecting on this binomial allows authors and readers to analyze how the space we inhabit becomes a character, a trauma or repudiation within fiction and poetry.”
Other authors who will participate are Gabriela Cantú Westendarp, Sofía Segovia, Renato Tinajero, Ingrid Bringas, Genaro Saúl Reyes, María Belmonte and Armando Alanís Pulido.
LabNL (former Federal Palace), Museo del Noreste and Museo La Milarca will be the main venues for the literary gathering.
Nuevo León will have about 3 thousand copies for sale at its stand at the Guadalajara 2025 International Book Fair, the most important in Latin America and worldwide for literature in Spanish.
The editorial efforts of Conarte, Fondo Editorial de Nuevo León and 3Museos will be represented at this great party.
There will also be texts from Oficio Ediciones, Cuadrivio, Tilde Editores, Editorial 42 Líneas, Editorial Analfabeta, Ojos de Anya, Paseo de la Mujer Mexicana, Tres Nubes Ediciones and Ediciones Tres Caminos.
The FIL from Guadalajara will take place from Saturday, November 29 to Sunday, December 7.