The Mexican writer and journalist Juan Antonio Villoro Ruiz has won recognition for excellence at the Gabo 2022 Award, the Gabo Foundation reported in a press release on Wednesday.
The governing council of the Prize, made up of prominent journalists, writers and academics, decided to award this recognition to Villoro (Mexico City, 1956) "for the brilliant and inspiring set of his work and career" and the "own, deep and critical look that he projects in his journalistic exercise with rigor, ethics and exemplary talent”.
Villoro is, according to the jury, one of the most important voices in current chronicles and literature, and "an exceptional interpreter and narrator of the social, cultural and political realities of Mexico, Latin America and the world."
This award to Villoro is a recognition of a narrator "who captivates through the living word, who respects, knows and uses like few others" and a "great speaker of the language who teaches to refine the language to have beauty and efficiency" in diversity of genres ranging from columns and children's stories, to plays and chronicles.
The governing council of the award explains that Villoro's chronicles are references of this hybrid genre between the novel, the report and the essay that the same author called the platypus of prose.
"Villoro is a man who, when he goes out into the street, is capable of turning any subject into an attractive one: in a wonderful chronicle, an acute social criticism, a necessary intervention in public conversation," reads the award verdict.
In a profile on Villoro written by the Mexican editor Julieta García González as a result of the award, it is said that the award-winner's love of writing began as a child, with his first readings.
“At the age of 15, a reading came to him that would change his vital panorama, taking him out of his center.
The work was
Profile
, the initiatory novel that José Agustín published at the age of 22”, writes García González.
And she adds: “Juan identified himself with the central character who lived through circumstances that seemed suspiciously similar to his own.”
Juan Villoro will be one of the special guests at the award ceremony that will take place on October 21, 22 and 23 at the Gymnasium Moderno school, in the north of Bogotá.
This year the Gabo Foundation celebrates 40 years since the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Gabriel García Márquez and 10 years of the festival.
There, in addition, there will be space to honor the winners of the five categories of the Prize contest: Audio, Coverage, Photography, Image and Text.
With this recognition, Villoro joins a group of outstanding journalists who have received the Recognition of Excellence from the Gabo Award since its creation in 2013: Giannina Segnini (2013), Javier Darío Restrepo and Marcela Turati (2014), Dorrit Harazim (2015 ), the El Faro team (2016), Jorge Ramos (2017), Ignacio Escolar (2018), Jesús Abad Colorado (2019), the Radio Cooperativa team (2020) and Pedro X. Molina (2021).
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