Literary prize established to honor Aura Estrada
By Francisco Goldman September 19, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

On July 26, 2007, when my wife, Aura Estrada, died, I vowed to somehow start a prize in her honor. Nearly 14 months later, that prize is becoming a reality. This has happened thanks to the hard work and devotion of many friends who loved Aura and because of the contributions of so many who were moved by her story. Aura, at the time of her death, was a 30-year-old Ph.D. student at Columbia University as well as a student in the Hunter College MFA program, where she was studying fiction writing with Peter Carey and Colum McCann, and where, as the recipient of a Hertog Fellowship, she was also a research assistant to Toni Morrison. Writing in Spanish, Aura had already begun to publish essays and stories in some of Mexico and Latin America’s best magazines, and she was also beginning to publish in English, in Bookforum and the Boston Review. The Aura Estrada Prize will be given every two years to a female Spanish-language writer of creative prose, 35 or younger, living in Mexico or the United States. This unique prize will combine a cash award with residencies in writers’ colonies and publication in Spanish language Granta. You can read more about the prize and Aura's life and writing at www.auraestradaprize.org  and at www.hunter.cuny.edu/creativewriting/memoriam/. 

The prize has generated an extraordinary response, inspiring the participation and generosity, in many different ways, of writers such as Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Seamus Heaney, Salman Rushdie, and younger friends of Aura such as Junot Díaz, Susan Choi, Rivka Galchen and many others. The Oaxaca-based artist Francisco Toledo, probably Mexico’s most renowned contemporary artist, is producing a special once-only design of 15 signed and numbered works of his “Papalote” series just for the Aura Estrada Prize. These and rare, signed special editions and books by García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Henry Miller, Colm Toibin and others will be available through the prize website. We are also, for one thousand dollars (or more!) each, offering dinners—in the homes or in the restaurant of the hosts’ choosing— with writer friends such as Jon Lee Anderson, Junot Díaz, Gary Shteyngart, Colm Toibin and (they will come to your dinner together) Susan Choi and Jhumpa Lahiri or Rivka Galchen and Heidi Julavitz.

Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt are coming to Oaxaca to headline a benefit and reading for the prize on November 6 and 7. This will inaugurate what will be an annual Aura Estrada Reading, by an American or English writer, at the Oaxaca Book Fair. There are plans to nationally televise, on the equivalent of Mexico’s PBS, Paul and Siri's reading and parts of the event. We are also hosting a benefit art auction at famed Mexico City jazz club El Zinco on November 25 (the U.S. Embassy is helping us bring down a first-rate jazz performer) and the prize will be officially announced at a press conference, with the participation of Gabriel García Márquez, at the Guadalajara Book Fair on December 1.

I hope that this prize will interest the great community of literary bloggers and readers! We've worked really hard, and as we are all total amateurs at this, we are amazed that we are actually pulling this off! Please take a look at AuraEstradaPrize.org and help spread the word and help up attract donations, especially for the writers’ dinners and art, book and manuscript auctions!

Aura Estrada and local connections

Aura Estrada was born on April 24, 1977, in León, Guanajuato, Mexico. She was four when she and her mother moved to Mexico City. There, Aura attended elementary school at the Colegio Buckingham, and high school at the Colegio Madrid. She attended college at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), from which she graduated with a BA in English Literature (2000) and an MA in Comparative Literature (2003.) Her master’s thesis, about the influence of William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and Robert Louis Stevenson on Jorge Luis Borges, was later published as a book by the Mexican small press Scripta, as was a subsequent long essay, “Borges, prologuista.” She also studied at University of Texas, Austin (1998-99) and, on a visiting scholar grant, at Brown University (2002). In the fall of 2003 she enrolled as a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Literature at Columbia University. That year she also won a Fulbright Scholarship.

On August 20, 2005, Aura and Francisco Goldman were married in Atotonilco, Guanajuato. Their friends came from all over the world. In July 2007, while vacationing with Francisco and her close friend and cousin Fabiola Rebora at the Mexican Pacific beach town of Mazunte, Aura suffered an accident in the waves and died the next day, July 25, in a hospital in Mexico City.

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

A Look at Gabriel García Márquez

Oh boy—does he write well. . . . The Garcimarquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new resources, been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and when called upon, take off and soar. —Thomas Pynchon, The New York Times Book Review

I’m a big fan of García Márquez. He’s a wonderful writer. And he doesn’t use –ly adverbs 

(-mente in Spanish.) My friends know I don’t approve of the use of lots of –ly adverbs. He says, “In Spanish, the adverb –mente is a very easy solution. But when you want to use –mente and look for another form, it [the other form] is always better.” He used none in Love in the Time of Cholera. A man after my own heart. In 1982 the Colombian author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. —William Kennedy

One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967. This book is often listed as the best book written in the twentieth century. It’s the story of the Buendía family, starting with José Arcadio Buendía, who led a group of people from his town hoping to find the sea. He didn’t find it but instead founded the village where they live by the side of a river. How about that first line?

First paragraph: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades’ magical irons. . . .

Open Love in the Time of Cholera at any page and be drawn into the steamy backwater of coastal Colombia of nearly a century ago. Stay a while, and find that the familiar surrounds in which you read now seem alien when you look up. That is a rare gift. —The Milwaukee Journal

Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985. I first read this book when my daughter and I stayed at a B&B in Tlaquepaque and I had decided to move to Mexico. This book about unrequited love did nothing to convince me I was making a mistake.

Excerpt: Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking of her for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out of hand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months, and four days ago. He did not have to keep a running tally, drawing a line for each days on the walls of a cells, because not a day had passed that something did not happen to remind him of her. At the time of their separation he lived with his mother, Tránsito Ariza, in one half of a rented house on the Street of Windows, where she kept a notions shop ever since she was a young woman, and where she also unraveled shirts and old rags to sell as bandages for the men wounded in the war. He was her only child, born of an occasional alliance with the well-known shipowner Don Pius V Loayza, one of the three brothers who had founded the River Company of the Caribbean and thereby given new impetus to steam navigation along the Magdalena River.


As usual, García Márquez’s craftsmanship is nothing less than superb. His General’s story is tragic; his telling of it is luminous. —The Dallas Morning News

The General in His Labyrinth, 1989. The General in the title of this amazing novel is none other than the real-life Simón Bolívar, the complex South American hero. Here he is at the end of his life and no longer in power, reflecting on the past as he travels on a long voyage down the Magdalena River.

Excerpt: It was the end. General Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios was leaving forever. He had wrested from Spanish domination an empire five times more vast than all of Europe, he had led twenty years of wars to keep it free and united, and he had governed it with a firm hand until the week before, but when it was time to leave he did not even take away with him the consolation that anyone believed in his departure. The only man with enough lucidity to know he really was going, and where he was going to, was the English diplomat, who wrote in an official report to his government: “The time he has left will hardly be enough for him to reach his grave.”

Next week: More South American writers. Happy reading!

Book fair in San Miguel

From October 17 to 26, the Biblioteca Pública and the cultural foundation Un Chorro de Literatura (An Abundance of Literature) will present a book fair titled FELISMA 2008 (Feria del Libro San Miguel de Allende 2008). 

The fair will include an exhibit of rare books at the Colegio San Francisco de Sales (currently the University of León) in Plaza Cívica; a presentation of books by authors Yolanda Lacarieri, Wim Coleman, Pat Perrin, Carmen Rioja and Gonzalo Celorio; a lecture workshop by Víctor Sahuatoba about Carlos Fuentes’ La region más transparente (The most transparent region); and a workshop in English called “Self-Publishing Your Own Picture Book” by Linda Lowery and Rick Keep. Dances and music by estudiantinas will also be part of the fair. Author Gonzalo Celorio will offer a master class titled “Tribute to Carlos Fuentes on his 80th Birthday.”