Parallel Lives - A Biographer's View of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa

We are delighted to welcome Gerald Martin to deliver the inaugural Canning House - Instituto Cervantes Cultural Address. The topic of this year's address focuses on two of Latin America's most renowned and beloved literary figures, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa through the unique perspective of Martin, their biographer. Both García Márquez and Vargas Llosa were major figures in the "Latin American Boom" of the 1960s and 70s; García Márquez' notable works are One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, and Vargas Llosa's include Conversation in the Cathedral and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

Gerald Martin: the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages in the University of Pittsburgh. He is a literary critic and historian. His favourite activities are reading, writing and travelling and he has visited all the countries of Latin America, several of them many times. He has lived in Mexico, Bolivia and Colombia.

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) (Men of Maize) and El Señor Presidente (2000) (The President), as well as translating the former work. (He has also translated novels by the Spanish writers Rafael Chirbes and Max Aub.)

In the 1980s he concentrated on the history of literature and the arts, contributing three major chapters to the Cambridge History of Latin America and publishing Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1989). Since then he has focused on biography. In 2008 he published a biography of Gabriel García Márquez with Bloomsbury and Knopf, which has appeared in more than twenty languages, and in 2012 an Introduction to Gabriel García Márquez for CUP. He is currently working on a biography of Mario Vargas Llosa for Bloomsbury which is scheduled to appear in 2017.

Registration will be from 18.15 for an 18.30 start. 

Corporate members please email: [email protected]