En un lugar de Cuba de cuyo nombre quiero acordarme

In my own words

Alain Gutiérrez Almeida, a brother to me, brought me the call for entries to the Reescribir El Quijote en Cuba competition in 2005. It was launched by the Embassy of Spain in Cuba and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of Miguel de Cervantes' El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha.

The central idea of the competition was to complete, in a new version, the famous chapter VIII of the novel, starting precisely from Don Quixote's encounter with the windmills. With my text De la extraña aventura de Don Quijote por lejanas tierras y otros sucesos hasta hoy olvidados I won First Prize and, more importantly still, decided to take being a writer more seriously.

Two anecdotes stayed with me from this experience. At some point in the late nineties, the talented journalist Juan Orlando Pérez was researching juries and competitions. In the obligatory interview I declared (with a youthful boldness I still keep, though I would add nuances) that a competition prize is, above all, the opinion of a few people, however qualified, and not necessarily an endorsement that guarantees quality.

And yet, by a joke of fate and of the literary gods, not long afterwards the opinion of a jury brought me, besides joy, a couple of important decisions in my life. The jury, made up of the Spaniards Manuel Gutiérrez, a filmmaker, and Carlos Alonso Zaldívar, then Spanish Ambassador to Cuba, and of the Cuban writers Reynaldo González and Leonardo Padura, gave me a prize that was a real boost. Not so much of quality, since the verdicts of masters do not automatically anoint one with their talents, but a boost to take this business of writing more seriously.

The second anecdote is simpler. This was the first text that, many years later, I published as an EPUB. So this story has always gone about opening doors and showing roads.

ALS

Details

title

En un lugar de Cuba de cuyo nombre quiero acordarme (Somewhere in Cuba, Whose Name I Do Wish to Recall)

authorship

Various authors

genre

Fiction

edition

Rafael Botí Provincial Foundation for the Visual Arts, Provincial Council of Córdoba, Embassy of Spain in Cuba and Spanish Agency for International Cooperation

year

2005

cover

Cover illustration and vignettes by Tomás Egea Ascona

award

First prize, Reescribir El Quijote en Cuba competition, 2005

rights

Available for editions and translations outside Cuba, covering only the texts by Antonio López Sánchez that this collective volume includes. Rights enquiries · derechos@antoniolopezsanchez.art