Madrid
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Chilean journalist and writer
Christian Alarcon (La Unión, Chile, 1970) has won the XXV edition of the Alfaguara award for the work ‘The Third Paradise’, a “beautiful novel with a dual structure” set in various places in Chile and Argentina and in which the protagonist “reconstructs the history of his ancestors”. The award is endowed with 175,000 dollars, a sculpture by Martín Chirino and the simultaneous publication of the winning book throughout the Spanish-speaking territory.
“It is a door to the hope of finding a refuge from collective tragedies in small things,” explained the president of the jury, Fernando Aramburu, at a face-to-face and telematic press conference from the Casino de Madrid, who added that ‘The third paradise’ It also reflects recognizable historical facts: from the 1960 earthquake to Allende’s arrival in power or the coup d’état and subsequent repression.
The jury highlighted that the novel by Alarcón, founder and director of the amphibian magazine, «opens a door to the hope of finding a refuge in the small in the face of collective tragedies». In the words of its author, who connected to the press conference from his home in Buenos Aires (Argentina), “beauty begins in the wonder of flowers, as beautiful as they are finite, in which we will always see the mystery that cannot be solved.”
Alarcón, who debuts in the novel with ‘The third paradise’, which will hit Spanish bookstores next March 24th, confessed that the book, written during the pandemic, “came out of despair and loneliness.” “I have always fought for journalism, but this time I decided to give myself to the construction of this artifact that has nothing to do with the logic of reality,” he concluded.
