Leonardo Padura Fuentes: Cuba's Man of Letters
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.5.1.0061 |
| Pages | 61-75 |
| Published date | 01 April 2013 |
| Date | 01 April 2013 |
| Author | Susan Metz |
IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/
bookS
leonardo Padura fuenteS:
Cuba’S man of letterS
Exclusive interview, by Susan Metz
Leonardo Padura Fuentes (born in Havana in 1955) is the best known and most
widely read contemporary Cuban author. He has published eight novels, two
volumes of short stories and seven works of non-fiction. He has also written
scripts for documentaries and recently for a series of short films about Havana
directed by different cinematographers. His work has been translated into at
least eight languages, and he has won a number of important prizes including the
Dashiell Hammett prize for the best detective novel from the international division
of Writers of Crime Fiction (1996) and the Italian Premio Letterario Francesco
Gelmi di Caporiacco (2010). His achievement was officially recognised in Cuba in
December 2012 when the Cuban Ministry of Culture awarded him the National
Prize for Literature, the country’s highest literary honour.
Padura always wanted to be a journalist. He studied philology and Latin
American literature at the University of Havana. His voice as a writer developed
as he practised ‘literary journalism’ in regular columns in one of the national
newspapers based on interviews with intellectuals and national cultural figures.
Padura is best known for a series of detective novels whose main character, Mario
Conde, struggles with his job as a policeman as he yearns to realise his dream of
being a writer. Each book develops ‘the Count’s’ relationships with friends from
his Havana youth as well as with his wide network of neighbours, associates and
professional contacts as he investigates a crime committed in the Cuban capital
during the difficult ‘Special Period in the Time of Peace’ of the 1990s.
In each case, Conde encounters characters from various sectors of their society,
and each narrative explores an aspect of Cuban social reality. Padura combines
a journalist’s attention to accurate documenting of the historical period with
a novelist’s exploration of the motivation of his characters. His vocabulary is
subtle, and his dexterity with the Spanish language demonstrates that his talent
has been cultivated with extensive training and years of practice. The Mario
Conde novels are deftly translated into English by Peter Bush and published in
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