The César Manrique Foundation (FCM) will host the conference entitled 'Against Commonplaces', which will be given by the writer Bernardo Atxaga, National Prize for Spanish Literature 2019 and Liber Prize in 2021 for his literary career and contribution to the international projection of the Basque and Castilian languages. The event will take place in the José Saramago room (La Plazuela, Arrecife) this Thursday, November 9, at 7:30 p.m., and will also be broadcast live through the FCM website and YouTube channel.
According to the writer, it was "a trip to Pompeii that led him to understand his native country and create an unusual place called 'Obaba'. Later, in the seventies and eighties of the last century, he witnessed the "intensification of political violence and the impact it had both on that 'Obaba' and on the entire Basque Country." Titles such as Obabakoak, The Lone Man and The Accordionist's Son tell that experience. In recent years, Atxaga has once again used unusual literary registers that he had previously only used in children's literature or poetry. From the Other Side or Exteriors of Paradise are an example of this new stage.
Bernardo Atxaga's conference is part of the meeting space between creators and the public entitled The Author and His Work. It is a multidisciplinary forum in which invited authors talk about the relationship they have with their creative work and review some of the constants that guide their dedication. José Ángel Valente, Rosa Montero, Alberto Corazón, Juan Gelman, Susan Sontag, Juan Goytisolo, Carmen Martín Gaite, Eduardo Galeano, Iñaki Ábalos, Ángeles Mastretta, Günter Grass, José Saramago and Eduardo Mendoza, among others, have participated in this forum.
Among the publications of Bernardo Atxaga (Asteasu, 1951), pseudonym of José Irazu, are Obabakoak (1989), Euskadi Prize and National Narrative Prize; Memoirs of a Cow (1992); The Lone Man (1994); Those Skies (1997); The Accordionist's Son (2004); Seven Houses in France (2009); Nevada Days (2014); Houses and Tombs (2020); From the Other Side (2022) and Exteriors of Paradise (2023). His work can be read in thirty-five languages.
In the field of poetry, he published his first book, Ethiopia, in 1978, and was awarded the Cesare Pavese Prize in 2003 for the Italian translation of Poemas&Híbridos, Dall´altra parte della frontiera. His work has been brought to the cinema by Montxo Armendariz (Obaba, 2005), Aizpea Goenaga (Zeru horiek, 2006), Imanol Rayo (Bi anai, 2011) and Fernando Bernues (The Accordionist's Son, 2018). Bernardo Atxaga is a member of Euskaltzaindia, the Academy of the Basque Language, since 2006.
