2024-10-07 18:38:15
Two Argentine authors, the cartoonist Sole Otero and the writer Enzo Maqueira, made their work known to the British public this Saturday at the London Spanish Book Fair, both coinciding with the “bad” moment that writers are going through in their country.
Otero, 39 years old and originally from the City of Buenos Aires, winner of awards at the comic festivals in the French cities of Poitiers, Angouleme and Colomiers, between 2021 and 2023, has lived in the French country for five years.
“It’s the place where the most comics are read and sold, so I moved there basically because it’s a work issue,” explains Sole Otero to AFP.
Before these awards, the graphic novel author had already been awarded in Spain with her best-known work, ‘Naftalina’.
– Translated into five languages –
Otero, who arrives in London after having published in Spanish, French, English and German, will see his first book appear in Portuguese next year.
The author is the latest representative of a brilliant list of great names of Argentine cartoonists, with Quino, the creator of Mafalda, at the helm.
«At some point in Argentina there was a very strong comic industry. Everyone read comics. It was like something deeply rooted in the culture, as it is now in France too,” says Otero.
However, he acknowledges that the comic “declined during the crisis of the nineties, because the publishers closed.”
Although, according to Otero, “in recent years there has been an attempt to give value and place to comics. There are small authors who make their books. And in the middle of all that I am part of that.
That small recovery did not prevent, according to the author, many cartoonists from leaving the country “because it is impossible to make a living from this in Argentina.”
The author thinks that the situation has not improved with the government of Javier Milei.
“Everything that is cultural at this moment is in a terrible situation, because our current government is totally committed to defunding everything that is cultural,” he says.
“It’s a bad time and the truth is that people are doing everything very freely,” he adds.
Added to this, according to Otero, is “a difficult economic situation.”
«Buying a book is not a priority for anyone. “People try to see how they can make ends meet with much more basic things,” he says.
– Portrait painter of a generation –
For his part, Enzo Maqueira, also from the Argentine capital, 46 years old, author of five novels, traveled from Argentina to participate in the fair.
Maqueira, which has been translated into English, French, Italian and Portuguese, tries to portray the current Argentine generations in his works.
“It’s about reflecting time, analyzing, debating, proposing a debate about the time we live in,” the author tells AFP.
One of his best-known novels, ‘Electrónica’, is considered a portrait of middle-class Argentine university youth, while his latest work, ‘Sexual Hygiene of the Bachelor’, tells the story of a boy who becomes a man and he fights with the patterns of behavior established according to an ideal of masculinity.
“What I try to portray is an aspect of the world we live in that perhaps is not so portrayed, that perhaps is a little invisible,” adds Maqueira.
The writer agrees with Sole Otero on the bad times that authors are experiencing in his country.
«Everything is pretty ugly there. The extreme right is ruling us, with all the budget cuts. “We are having a pretty bad time,” he says.
Despite everything, Maqueira thinks that “Argentine literature is going through a great moment.”
“From 2001 until now, there was a very big crisis, but many independent publishers appeared that published young authors who were emerging,” he explains.
The London Spanish Book and Zine Fair, created in 2019 and to which Otero and Maqueira were invited, had more than 50 exhibitors from France, Spain, Germany, Argentina and Mexico.
© Agence France-Presse