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Wikipedia / Alonso Cueto

Alonso Cueto Caballero (born 30 April 1954 in Lima, Peru) is a Peruvian novelist, short story writer, essayist, university professor and newspaper columnist. His writing career has spanned more than four decades, during which he has produced dozens of works of fiction, articles and essays. He has won numerous accolades for his work, and several of his novels have been adapted for film. His novels have been translated into more than seventeen languages.

Biography

The son of Peruvian philosopher and educator and children's literature promoter , Alonso Cueto spent his early childhood in Paris and Washington, D.C., where he attended the Lafayette School (1960–61). He returned to Lima at the age of seven, where he attended the Colegio Carmelitas (1962–70).

Cueto earned a bachelor's degree in literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in 1977, with a thesis on the poetry of Emilio Adolfo Westphalen. He then traveled to Spain on a scholarship from the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica to research the work of Luis Cernuda. In 1979 he enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, where he obtained a doctorate in 1984 with a thesis on the short stories of Juan Carlos Onetti.

He returned to Peru in 1984 and published several books over the succeeding decades. He worked as a columnist for several publications and served as director of El Comercios El Dominical Sunday supplement. In 2003, he left El Comercio to pursue writing and teaching full-time. He is married to Kristin Keenan Atwood and has two sons.

He was elected a member of the Peruvian Academy of Language in 2009.

Writing career

Cueto's debut short story collection, La batalla del pasado (Alfaguara, 1983), portrays the lives of exiles in Europe and shows the influence of Henry James in its careful exploration of private life and psychological nuance. His first novel, El tigre blanco (1985), won the Premio Wiracocha.

His novel Grandes miradas (2003) is set during the government of Alberto Fujimori and his adviser Vladimiro Montesinos.

In 2005, he published his best-known novel, La hora azul, in which a wealthy lawyer searches for the woman his military father had taken prisoner during the armed struggle between the Peruvian government and Shining Path rebels. Mario Vargas Llosa called the book "a magnificent novel that lucidly and imaginatively describes the aftermath of 10 years of civil war and terrorism", and J. M. Coetzee described it as "a dark and disturbing novel".The novel won the prestigious Premio Herralde in 2005. Its English translation by Frank Wynne, published as The Blue Hour (Random House UK, 2012), was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and won the Valle-Inclán Prize in 2013.

Reviewing The Blue Hour in World Literature Today, César Ferreira of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee described it as "a riveting, fast-paced novel" that "starts out as a political thriller and turns into a well-crafted and gripping psychological drama." The Financial Times wrote that "the conflation of Adrian's personal trauma with his nation's dark history is beautifully, delicately done", while the Times Literary Supplement noted that "Cueto manages to explore that quest both imaginatively and provocatively."

La hora azul was followed by two novels forming the Redención trilogy: La pasajera and La viajera del viento, which together explore the years of terrorism and political strife in Peru.

In 2019, Cueto won the Premio de Narrativa Alcobendas Juan Goytisolo for his novel Palabras de otro lado.

In October 2020, the University of Texas Press published the English version of The Wind Traveller, translated by Frank Wynne and Jessie Mendez Sayer. Publishers Weekly reviewed the novel positively.

Besides novels, Cueto has written several short story collections and essays as well as a children's book and a play. He also teaches in the Department of Literature at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and writes a weekly column for El Comercio newspaper.

Several of Cueto's works have been adapted for film. Francisco Lombardi based his film Mariposa negra (2006) on the novel Grandes miradas; it won the Glauber Rocha prize at the Montreal International Film Festival. La pasajera inspired the film Magallanes (2015) by director Salvador del Solar, which won the Cine en Construcción award at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. La hora azul was adapted into a film of the same name in 2014 by Evelyne Pegot-Ogier.

Awards and honors

Works

Novels

  • El tigre blanco, Editorial Planeta Peru, 1985

  • Deseo de noche, Editorial Apoyo, 1993 (Editorial Pre-Textos, 2003)

  • El vuelo de la ceniza, Apoyo, 1995 (Seix Barral, 2007)

  • Demonio del mediodía, Peisa, 1999

  • Grandes miradas, Peisa, 2003 (Editorial Anagrama, 2005; Penguin Random House, 2017)

  • La hora azul, Peisa / Anagrama, 2005 (Planeta, 2013; Penguin Random House, 2018)

  • El susurro de la mujer ballena, Planeta, 2007

  • La venganza del silencio, Planeta, 2010

  • Cuerpos secretos, Planeta, 2012

  • La pasajera, Seix Barral, 2015

  • Duelo en la Ciudad de Plata, Seix Barral, 2015

  • La viajera del viento, Planeta, 2016

  • La segunda amante del rey, Penguin Random House, 2017

  • Testamento de sangre, Penguin Random House, 2018

  • La Perricholi. Reina de Lima, Penguin Random House, 2019

  • Palabras de otro lado, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2019

  • Otras caricias, Penguin Random House, 2021

  • Francisca. Princesa del Perú, Penguin Random House, 2023

Short story collections

  • La batalla del pasado, Alfaguara, Madrid, 1983 (Editorial Apoyo, 1996; Alfaguara Juvenil Perú, 2011)

  • Los vestidos de una dama, Editorial Peisa, Lima, 1987 (1998)

  • Amores de invierno, Apoyo, 1994 (Planeta, 2006)

  • Cinco para las nueve y otros cuentos, Alfaguara, Lima, 1996 (Barcelona Digital Editions, 2014)

  • Pálido cielo, Peisa, 1998 (Norma, 2010)

  • El otro amor de Diana Abril, Peisa, 2002

  • Lágrimas artificiales / Dalia y los perros, Peisa, 2014

Essays and non-fiction

  • Mario Vargas Llosa. La vida en movimiento, Fondo Editorial de la UPC, 2003

  • Valses, rajes y cortejos, Peisa, 2005

  • Sueños reales, Seix Barral, 2008

  • Juan Carlos Onetti. El soñador en la penumbra, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009

  • La piel de un escritor, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014

  • Diario Los Años, Ediciones Cueto, 2023

Children's books and other

  • El árbol del tesoro, Planeta, 2011

  • Encuentro casual (play), Peisa, 2002

English translations

Film Adaptations

His novel Grandes Miradas was adapted into a movie (Mariposa Negra) by Francisco Lombardi in 2006. Cueto's novel La Hora Azul/The Blue Hour which won the Herralde Prize in 2006. was published in English in 2012 (translated by Frank Wynne) and was shortlisted for the 2013 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and won the Valle Inclán Prize in 2013.

References