Family, friends and colleagues mourn the death of Chilean writer Jorge Edwards, who died this Friday in Madrid at the age of 91. Among them, the writer Mario Vargas Llosa has wanted to pay a special tribute to the late author, and has done so by recalling one of his novels, ‘Persona non grata’. In statements to which the Prensa Ibérica group has had access, Vargas Llosa recalled that Edwards “became very famous for a book on Cuba – ‘Persona non grata’ – that he published in the 1970s, and where he revealed his conversations with Fidel Castro and with what would be an opposition group with which he already had a fairly close relationship”. According to Vargas Llosa, the book “impressed” because it was the first to “deeply and rigorously criticize the Cuban dictatorship.”
“Jorge confessed his fears, the fact that they took him for a walk in an unpremeditated way and that he always had the feeling that they could lose him,” make him disappear. The book had enormous repercussions in Latin America but “it also contributed a lot to the dissemination of his novels,” recalls Vargas Llosa.
Vargas Llosa also stands out how Edwards went out of his way to recount his personal experiences in his soap operas. “For example, very recently he confessed that a priest -he had been in a Jesuit school- had raped him”, points out Vargas Llosa, and he recounted this in a very rigorous way, “how that priest had constantly gone to his house to try to wake him up”, making it clear that he had a good impression of the religious order regardless of the behavior of this priest “that created a trauma”.
The relevance of the writer in his time was very important, insists Vargas Llosa, and he was one of the architects who contributed the most to establishing the high levels that Latin American literature reached in those years.
The funeral chapel of Jorge Edwards, 1999 Cervantes Prize winner, will be installed tomorrow at the La Paz Funeral Home, in the town of Alcobendas.
Writer and journalist, he was an academic of Language in Chile and a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. He combined literature with regular collaborations in Chilean and international newspapers and conferences and courses at American universities.
Chile, Spain and France, writing, politics, non-conformity and marginality, as well as love as the engine of human action, were recurring themes and places in Edwards’ work, which received the National Prize for Literature of Chile (1994) or the prestigious Cervantes Award (1999) in Spain.
Apart from these awards, he won the Silver Pen at the Bilbao Book Fair (2008) for his career, the Planeta-Casamérica Ibero-American Narrative Prize for his novel “La casa de Dostoievsky” (2008), the International Prize for Valladolid Cristóbal Gabarrón de las Letras Foundation (2009), or the González Ruano Prize for Journalism (2011), and in 2016 he was recognized with the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise