Peruvian-born novelist Benavides is writer-in-residence at UW-Green Bay
Jorge Benavides
The Humanistic Studies academic unit and the Spanish language program at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay are planning several public events this semester to mark the writer-in-residence visit of Jorge Eduardo Benavides.
The Peruvian-born Benavides is a novelist, journalist and educator who has a permanent residence in Madrid, Spain, where he directs the Centro de Formación de Novelistas and writes frequently for publications including El País, Letras Libres, Eñe and Mercurio.
At UW-Green Bay, Benavides is teaching two courses this fall: Spanish 438 – Major Spanish and Latin American Writers and Spanish 465 – Creative Writing in Spanish. He has at least three public appearances scheduled in October:
• At 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 11, he will lead a talk at the downtown Brown County Library as part of the University’s Great Books discussion series. His subject will be the novel “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” a satire by Mario Vargas Llosa, who last year received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The book is set in 1950s Peru amid the golden age of radio soap operas.
• At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13, Benavides will present a reading from his work at The Reader’s Loft bookstore, 2069 Central Court, Bellevue. He will read from his short story “Cosas de niños (Kid’s Stuff)” in Spanish, with English translation.
• On Oct. 20 and 21, Benavides will represent himself and UW-Green Bay in leading a creative writing workshop at the Cervantes Institute in Chicago. Established by the government of Spain in 1996, the non-profit center promotes teaching and knowledge of Spanish language and culture.
As a professor of creative writing, Benavides has led seminars and courses at Harvard, at Cervantes cultural centers in Vienna and Albuquerque, and at other universities and cultural centers in Madrid, Granada, La Coruña, Santander, Lima, Miami and Geneva. A native of Arequipa, Peru, he studied law and political science in the mid-1980s at the Universidad de Garcilaso de la Vega in Lima, the Peruvian capital. He worked as a radio journalist there until 1991 when he moved to Tenerife, Spain, where he spent more than a decade and was editor in chief of the newspaper Siglo XXI as well as a weekly columnist for the Sunday supplement of the Diario de Avisos.
He has published two collections of short stories, Cuentario y otros relatos (Okura Editores, 1989) and La noche de Morgana (Alfaguara, 2005). His four novels with Alfaguara, one of the most prestigious publishers in Spanish and Spanish-American circles, are Los años inútiles (2002), El año que rompí contigo (2003), Un millón de soles (2008) and La paz de los vencidos (2009). Benavides has won several important awards including most recently the 2009 Premio Novela Corta Julio Ramón Ribeyro for his novel La paz de los vencidos (The Peace of the Defeated). He has been a finalist for the prestigious Tigre Juan and Rómulo Gallegos prizes in Spanish literature.
For more information on Benavides’ residency at UW-Green Bay, contact Assistant Professor Gabriel Saxton-Ruiz of the Humanistic Studies faculty at (920) 465-2740 or SaxtonG@uwgb.edu.
