Fifty Years After The Nobel Prize: The Legacy Of Miguel Angel Asturias

Canning House and the Instituto Cervantes are delighted to welcome María Odette Canivell and Gerald Martin to deliver a lecture on Miguel Angel Asturias, Nobel-prize winning Guatemalan poet-diplomat, novelist, playwright and journalist. Asturias, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967 for Hombres de maíz (1949), has been credited with contributing to the establishment of Latin American literature in the Western world, and is considered a precursor to the Latin American boom of the 1960s and '70s.

María Odette Canivell teaches literature at the IE University in Madrid, Spain. She is Guatemalan, and holds degrees in psychology, philosophy and comparative literature. Her PhD focused on public intellectuals in Latin America, and she has published extensively on the subject of Latin American writers and politics. She has spoken on Asturias at a number of international conferences, as well as written about Leyendas de Guatemala (1930).

Gerald Martin is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a literary critic and historian, and his research and publications have focused on the Latin American novel. His PhD was devoted to Miguel Angel Asturias, who fortunately won the Nobel Prize before it was completed, and he has produced critical editions of Hombres de maíz (1981) and El Señor Presidente (2000), as well as a translation of the former.

His Excellency Acisclo Valladares-Molina, Ambassador for Guatemala, will introduce the event.

This event is organised jointly by Canning House and the Instituto Cervantes, with the kind support of the Embassy of Guatemala.

This event is fully booked and registration is now closed.