Colombia's premier novelist dies in Mexico City

The Colombian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez died in Mexico City on 17 April, at the age of 87. His relatives had in preceding days been preparing the press and the public for his possible and imminent death, due in part to a recurring cancer. García Márquez had been living in Mexico since the 1960s, and the country would pay him a public homage on 21 April in the capital's Palace of Fine Arts (Bellas Artes), the daily Excelsior reported. Latin American heads of state, writers and personalities expressed their sadness at the writer's death. The author's famous novels included One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Peruvian novelist to be given Mexico's Fuentes prize

Mario Vargas Llosa became on 15 October the first recipient of Mexico's Carlos Fuentes Prize for Literary Creation in Spanish, "for the contribution he has made from Spanish to enrich mankind's heritage," according to the head of the Spanish Royal Academy José Manuel Blecua Perdices, a member of the jury that voted him the prize. The prize, worth 250,000 USD, was created in memory of the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes who died in May 2012. Vargas Llosa was given the Nobel prize for literature in 2010 and has received two literary awards from Spain. On 15 October the head of the National Council for Culture and the Arts of Mexico (Conaculta) Consuelo Sáizar Guerrero, informed Vargas Llosa by video-conference of the decision; he is to receive the prize in person on 11 November, the birthday of Carlos Fuentes, AFP reported. Vargas Llosa has written numerous novels and essays, many set in Peru where he was born in 1936. He has become, unexpectedly perhaps for many, a cultural figure associated with liberal conservatism, with a disdain for modern popular culture that has likely irritated some conformists. In 2012 he was among certain prominent supporters of Mexico's conservative presidential candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota, who lost the race to Enrique Peña Nieto of the "centrist" Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI governed Mexico for most of the 20th century and imposed as Vargas Llosa said a "perfect dictatorship," hiding a clientelist and authoritarian regime behind a social-democratic appearance. It may have been no coincidence that Vargas Llosa "cancelled at the last minute" an invitation on 16 or 17 October to meet in Madrid with the visiting president-elect Peña Nieto.

Mexico creates literary prize

Mexico is to give out a 250,000-USD prize every 11 November to a writer in Spanish, in memory of the country's late novelist Carlos Fuentes, the daily ABC reported on 4 July, citing EFE. The Carlos Fuentes Prize for Literary Creation in Spanish (Premio Internacional Carlos Fuentes a la Creación Literaria en Idioma Español) was to honour Fuentes who died on 15 May, but also part of a project to make Mexico an "intellectual platform for Spanish," the head of state arts council Conaculta (Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes) Consuelo Sáizar told the press in Mexico City on 3 July. The prize was envisaged for writers whose works have enriched "the literary heritage of humanity in Spanish," Conaculta's cultural and arts secretary Roberto Vázquez said. It would be determined by a jury of seven including four writers or academics and three members of the language academies of Spain, Mexico and a Latin American state. their decision would be made known on 16 October.