Jorge Edwards wins

Chilean author Jorge Edwards has won the Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa prize for his novel La casa de Dostoievsky (written under the pseudonym Juan el Indiano). His novel honors an era of idealist poets in 1950's Santiago:

"Esta novela es sobre la poesía, los poetas y las ganas de ser poeta. Porque en el tiempo mío, los que no eran poetas--y yo finalmente no fui poeta--queríamos ser poetas. Y los que no querían ser poetas eran personajes que no mirábamos; que pertenecían a algunos fondos grises del paisaje santiagueño".

Aside from being a novelist, Jorge Edwards was Chile's ambassador to Cuba during Allende's presidency, which resulted in his being kicked out by Fidel in 1971. His subsequent memoir, Persona non grata, was controversial as the first leftist critique of the Cuban Revolution:

In 1970 Jorge Edwards was sent by socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende as his country’s first envoy to break the diplomatic blockade that had sealed Cuba for over a decade. His arrival coincided with the turning point of the revolution, when Castro began to repress the very intellectuals he once courted. In Kafkaesque detail, Edwards records the four explosive months he spent in Havana trying to open a Chilean embassy and his disenchantment with the revolution. His stay culminated in the arrest of his friend Heberto Padilla—the first imprisonment of a well-known writer by the regime—for giving Edwards a “negative view of the revolution.” In a menacing midnight political debate with Edwards immediately after Padilla’s arrest, Castro argued that in this phase of the revolution, bourgeois writers would no longer have “anything to do in Cuba.” Castro accused Edwards of “conduct hostile to the revolution” and declared him “persona non grata.” The winner of the Cervantes prize—the Spanish language equivalent to the Nobel Prize for literature—Jorge Edwards' memoir splendidly recounts this time and the wrath of Castro.

He recently shared his thoughts on Cuba's current transition phase.

Edwards was also a friend and personal secretary to Pablo Neruda and wrote Adios, Poeta, an anecdote-filled biography of Neruda's life and work.

Ever been had?

Libby Purves explains why the Betjeman hoax is such a good thing for "the whole trade of popular literary biography":

Sometimes it seems from the book pages that modern British readers are far keener to read clever-dick analysis and Hello!-style gossip about great writers than we are to approach their actual works, laying ourselves innocently and humbly open to what they have to say to us. It is good for publishers’ profits but less good for our souls. I was lucky enough years ago to study literature under tutors who demanded that we acquire only the most basic historical context and sketchy personal information about the masters, but who insisted that we knew each text and judged it by its intended meaning, its truth and the skill of its execution.

However good a biography, you still get closer to a writer’s heart and spirit by going back to the works themselves. It really is not necessary to know whether Jane Austen was a virgin, or which of T. S. Eliot’s wives it was who slept with Bertrand Russell. Interesting, but not essential. In youth I learnt much formative wisdom from Howards End before I ever found out that E. M. Forster was gay, or indeed a bloke at all; I read Evelyn Waugh at 12 in an equal state of uncertainty about the author’s gender, and nonetheless revelled in the acid beauty of the prose.

Later, in long university months of studying Paradise Lost, I dutifully checked up on the politics and religion of the time but felt only a passing interest in the fact that the blind poet dictated it to his daughters (and that interest was mainly because my tutorial partner and I had a theory that the damn thing was meant to be six times as long, only the duty daughter sometimes got bored and sneaked out of the room for a nap leaving Milton orating to the cat).

(via Bookninja)