JM Coetzee will live two months in Madrid as writer-in-residence at the Museo del Prado

Writers’ lodges, those which provide authors with the time, space, and means to work in the best of circumstances, are common in our cultural landscape, but without doubt none have had the honor of having such a wonderful and elusive participant as he. Coetzee Nobel laureate. It will be South Africa First author to make use of Escribir El Prado.as this newspaper learned.

A project by Miguel Valomir, director of the art gallery, promoted by the latter jointly with the Loewe Foundation and will allow many international writers to immerse themselves not only in the works presented in the museum but also in its collections and workshops, as in meetings with specialists, technicians and restorers, taking a real artistic bath. The goal is to promote the literary text that will be published before “Granta” magazine, first in its Spanish version and then in the British version. The publication and its North American editor Valerie Miles advise the international project.

That Coetzee (who has a Nobel Prize and two Booker Prizes to his credit) initiated the initiative indicates the ambition of the project that will lead the writer to visit The coming months of June and July The capital of Madrid, a stay that is very likely to be done with the utmost secrecy, given its proverbial debauched nature, away from the media spotlight and journalists.

“Questioning is a method I am not very good at. I am very brief in my answers, and this brevity (dryness) is often misinterpreted as a sign of annoyance or anger,” he explained in a letter to his friend Paul Auster, well aware of his apparent harshness.

I love Castilian

The Nobel laureate throughout his life, and especially in the twenty-first century, showed his willingness to move away from the poles of the more famous cultural powerhouses of the Anglo-Saxon scene, such as New York or London, the cities in which he resided. .

What has resulted in recent years in A special fondness for the Spanish language – Coetzee is considered a great connoisseur of Latin American literature – which led him to declare a speculative rigor in his writings in favor of the geopolitical South. By following these postulates, His most recent books have previously appeared in Spanish – precisely in the Argentine publishing house “El Hilo de Ariadna” – than it is in the English original, towards which it shows hesitation as “the language of globalization & rdquor ;”.

Just a year before he won the Nobel Prize in 2003, Coetzee moved to the Australian city of Adelaide as a professor at his university and soon after he also obtained Australian citizenship, another form of Symbolically called the southern hemisphere. And it is that the author has gradually left his face as a pure storyteller to become, over time, a critical thinker on issues such as the defense of animals, vegetarianism, and social injustice.

Spain, a country he visited as a private individual on several occasions, was a frequent setting for some of his stories. In the year 2000 he wrote a short story titled house in spain In it he explained that he had bought a house in the town of Lida in Belpweg, in Urgell, where according to the story he used to spend seasons. After the suspicion was aroused, the Spanish publisher Random House Literature ended up denying the information by explaining that the story was only restricted to the realm of pure imagination, although someone so jealous of his privacy could always suspect whether the author had actually come to reside there, in disguise . , For some time. It is impossible to know.

Without abandoning the Catalan geography, his latest work, “polish’, Back last year, plot load up Barcelona , where a Chopin pianist expert is invited by a woman he ends up falling in love with. And another note, Elizabeth Costello, the wandering figure who appears in many of his works and is seen as a substitute for the ego of the author himself, isolates herself for a certain period in A small town in Castile.

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On the weight of the arts in South African works, he has many pages devoted to cinema, dance and music in particular. It is noteworthy how in The Pole the author plays a picture of a dog in a park in Poland that practically freezes as if it were a painting and serves the hero in processing a powerful reflection on How memory changes our perception of images.

The suggestion of the Prado-based authors suggested that they should be Six in total writers or writers visiting the museum, one in the spring and a second in the fall for each of the three years of the project. The pair chosen annually will respond to a typical writer of a long career and high esteem and another of a more prominent nature, in residencies which will range from three weeks to two months.