Peru Takes Center Stage at the 8th Hispano-American Literature Festival

In the following lines we collect brief statements from some of the participants about several of the topics that will be addressed at the VIII Hispano-American Festival of Literature.

Jorge Eduardo Benavides, on Peruvian novels after Mario Vargas Llosa

The shielding shadow of Mario Vargas Llosa is not a lush tree casting shade over a forest; rather it has cast a different kind of light on contemporary Peruvian storytelling. Far from paralysis or the abyss that doom-laden prophecies often forecast after the sunset of a giant, I believe Peruvian literature today is in good health—vigorous and above all plural—sustained by a truly interesting generational coexistence.

This blossoming of the last decades rests on a decentralized polyphony where the monumental architecture of yesteryear has yielded to atmospheric acuity, intimate memory, and technical exploration. The foundations of this fruitful transition lie in the solidity of narrators and poets of considerable generational weight such as Rivera Martínez, Fernando Ampuero, Alonso Cueto, Fernando Iwasaki, Marco Matos, Alonso Ruiz Rosas—or Carmen Ollé—whose exploration of desire and corporeality defies conventions from a liberating perspective. Also notable is Teresa Ruiz Rosas, whose urban, psychological, poetic, and translational mastery has managed to coexist with the novelistic ambition of Gustavo Faverón, the popular sensibility of Gustavo Rodríguez, and the historical and Andean density of Karina Pacheco.

I don’t want to leave names out in this hurried roll call of writers, many of whom will be in La Palma: Giovanna Pollarolo — renowned for her delicacy in unraveling the domestic universe and female identity —, Marcos García Falcón or Iván Thays, both outstanding narrators; from this core, narrative expands organically toward younger voices that continue to enrich the scene: the sharp and eloquent prose of Katya Adaui crossing with the strange and fascinating atmospheres of Claudia Ulloa Donoso and the detective exploration of Charlie Becerra. I also want to mention the political acuity of Raúl Tola, Santiago Roncagliolo and Daniel Alarcón that forks into a different path in the family investigation of Renato Cisneros, in the search for identity and social ascent proposed by Jeremías Gamboa, or in the political exploration of Carlos Dávalos and the long-proven solidity of Luis Hernán Castañeda. Other younger creators, such as María José Caro and Gunter Silva, probe the folds of maturity, exile, and the strangeness of intimate space. In this ever-moving line-up, emerging promises and voices appear strongly, such as Giacomo Roncagliolo or Luis Francisco Palomino, whose drive confirms the constant renewal of the literary spectrum.

This flourishing shows that the vigor of a literature does not depend on the stature of its late patriarchs, such as Vargas Llosa, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, or Manuel Scorza, but on the fluid richness of the voices that preceded them. Post-Vargas Llosa Peruvian narrative has gained in freedom what it lost in centrality: a broad territory where stylistic rigor and the diversity of perspectives confirm its good health.

(Jorge Eduardo Benavides)

What is rural writing and why is that tension between Lima, the capital, and the rest of the country so important in Peru

In today’s Peru, the adjective “rural” carries with it a hint of insult. In a monstrously centralized country, where one in three inhabitants lives (or barely survives) in a hyper-thriving capital, rural evokes an archaic past. Surpassing that past is a traditional aspiration of the Peruvian immigrant, who has been leaving behind his “provincial” origin (in my country, remote places outside Lima are known as “the provinces”) for eighty years to access progress, embodied in the city: a nightmarish, deeply unequal agglomeration of modern buildings and precarious housing, where cars crawl through the saturation. It is customary for Limeños to complain about Lima, but the supremacy of the megalopolis is such that the idea of making a path “out there” seems naïve. Contemporary literature also aims to be sophisticated, that is, very urban, and recently it has given voice to the children of large migrations; that literature, if it chooses to narrate the countryside, often describes it as a root, almost never as a project. I was born in Lima but grew up on the outskirts, in a peripheral neighborhood near the sea, and I have always felt both rejection and fascination for my hometown, which I left at twenty-four to pursue studies in Literature in the United States. I did not reach the country of skyscrapers that appears in movies, but a mountain town called Boulder with an Andean tint and, yes, also rural, though I did not truly know rural life until I settled in the village of Middlebury, whose nine thousand inhabitants nearly disappear among green hills, cow farms, and small black bears that roam the streets in summer. We are not immune to the latest assault of modernity, and I mean that growing virtual bubble that condemns us to live behind screens rather than inside the world, but the surrounding nature provides an admirable counterbalance. In Middlebury I wrote a few years ago A Rural Writer, a contemplative novel that rejects urban bustle and every dream of grandeur to weave together fragments of a life felt inwardly. There lies, perhaps, the sense of rural writing: in the quiet of the meadow, the patience of the corn, and the loneliness of the lake, one seeks the path toward a new home, an interior landscape, a singular style. For the rural writer, the city is a stopover and the countryside a destination.

(Luis Hernán Castañeda)

Iván Thays, on the dissemination of Peruvian literature abroad

The dissemination of Peruvian literature abroad is practically non-existent, mainly due to the absence of a cultural policy. Add to that the lack of literary criticism and magazines or newspapers that pay attention to literature. And not only in print, but also online. We do not have a magazine that could be, for example, a Peruvian Letras Libres. Nor a national Babelia supplement. There are some individual efforts to spread literature—interview pages on YouTube, blogs or Substack—but they do not travel abroad; they are for domestic consumption. The few Peruvian authors whom international audiences can know are thanks to their own individual effort, that of their publishers, or their literary agents. That is why festivals that talk about Peru, such as the Hispano-American Festival, are extraordinary in the strict sense of the word.

There are authors who are gaining recognition, but not thanks to a coordinated effort, rather thanks to their individual circumstances. For example, Alonso Cueto is a very important narrator. There are also authors who live abroad, such as Renato Cisneros, Raúl Tola, Karina Pacheco, Gabriela Wiener, Santiago Roncagliolo, Katya Adaui, and, evidently, Gustavo Rodríguez, who won the Alfaguara prize a few years ago. There are also authors who, during 2025, had a great year of literature with international impact, such as Gustavo Faverón or Jeremías Gamboa. However, the bulk of Peruvian literature fails to circulate in ways that would make it known despite its talent, such as Susane Noltenius, Luis Hernán Castañeda, J.J Maldonado, Edwin Chávez, Stuart Flores, Giani Biffi, Ulises Gutiérrez, in short, a long list of authors who are very talented but have not achieved recognition abroad.

(Iván Thays)

Why you should read Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s fantastic short stories

On November 11, 1996, the Madrid newspaper ABC published an article by Alfredo Bryce Echenique, a classic figure of Peruvian literature and close friend of Julio Ramón Ribeyro, devoted to a reflective anecdote about what Ribeyro’s death meant to him. At the start of his piece, Bryce Echenique defines “El Flaco,” as friends called Ribeyro, “that cult writer whom many reread and who very few read.” The first and most immediate reason to read Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s fantastic tales, then, lies precisely in the fact that the fantastic aspect of his narrative is even more concerned with the precision of that statement. Known above all as an urban writer, attentive to describing the problematic and conflicting folds of the Lima space and its margins that blur into the countryside, Ribeyro’s fantastic tales, or those that appeal to the fantastic rhetoric, have often been eclipsed by his “realist” narrative (a term we use conventionally to distinguish two different modes of writing but which does not point to a true ontological difference) and urban.

The second reason why reading Ribeyro’s fantastical stories is, in my view, more interesting and captivating, is that it relates to his stylistic and metaphorical approach. Following the innovative shift in the mode of fantastic writing since the 1950s—and we cannot name Julio Cortázar as one of the masters of this new approach—the fantastic stories of Ribeyro work with a reality that is the same ordinary, everyday, even dull reality of the reader; thus, the anomaly appears within a world fully recognizable by the reader. This has a significant consequence for the effect of reading, since these Ribeyroesque fantastical tales do not aim to provoke cathartic fear as in traditional 19th- and early 20th-century fantastic fiction—think of the master of fantastic and horror tales H. P. Lovecraft—but rather a unease that slides into our minds, leading us to question the substance of our reality.

The third reason, more subtle but no less important, to read Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s fantastic narrative rests on the construction of characters and their relation to alteration, tension, and even rupture of their surroundings. I think that, unlike most fantastic narratives in which characters suffer the intrusion of the fantastic agent into reality as a threatening intrusion, in Ribeyro’s writing the characters adopt a different stance. They are not at the mercy of the alteration of their world passively, but choose an active, conscious acceptance of the change that has occurred or is occurring, ultimately embracing the impossibility of arriving at a rational explanation.

Thus, Ribeyro’s fantastic does not disturb or tense; it unsettles with elegant restraint while not taking away the deep smile of those who live it or read it.

(Margherita Cannavacciuolo)

On Blanca Varela on her centenary

To understand the greatness of her work, one only has to pause at poems such as “Monsieur Monod does not know how to sing,” “Calf harassed by horseflies,” or “House of the Ravens.” Regarding the latter, I don’t think I have read in our language anything so moving about the sense of motherhood. But there is more, much more: from her first book, Ese puerto existe and up to the latest, Ejercicios materiales, El libro de barro and Concierto animal, Blanca Varela’s poetry has the resilience and intensity to defy the passage of time. I do not doubt that in an uncertain future she will be regarded as a classical poet of our language.

Alonso Ruiz Rosas

Why write a thousand-page novel?

A thousand-page novel is written for many reasons, but I would say the first is that there is no other way out, because it is inevitable. And all of that is manifested in the very act of writing.

I began writing a novel of regular length, I thought, about my educational memory, the experiences that marked my primary and secondary education in the 1980s in Peru, and the college years in the 1990s when suddenly I realized that many of the motivations and anxieties of my experience as a student, many of the ambitions I carried with me, came from the pains and ghosts of my mother, a peasant woman who migrated from the Peruvian highlands to Lima in search of literacy, a right that had been denied to her for nineteen years. My experience and my mother’s, threaded through fiction, fused in this enormous text that takes on the story of Manuel Flores Amaro, a boy who returns to Peru after not finding a solution in a master’s program in the United States, and his mother, Candelaria Amaro Escriba, the woman who raised him with all her fury, love, and self-loathing. Now that I have finished the book, I think those thousand pages also obey the possibility of having found a metaphor that could encompass such a vast array of experiences and of people I met during my life (teachers, classmates, partners) and spark a reflection on how Peruvians are formed in the public schools of my country. I also suppose I had a huge biographical material backlog, a kind of logjam that unfolded across all those pages. As the process progressed I realized that my novel, in some way, dialogues with other long novels that have been written about my country, starting with José María Arguedas’s Todas las sangres, a list that culminates with Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversación en La Catedral. If in Vargas Llosa’s novel the concern for Peru passes through dictatorship and corruption, things that men have done, in mine the emphasis is on education and parenting—tasks that have been carried out mostly by women. I also feel that at some point I realized there was a political issue in writing nearly a thousand pages of a narrator who is a child of Quechua-speaking peasants taking charge of the novel’s discourse in the first person, something that narrators created by writers like Alfredo Bryce Echenique have done. In a way my novel is also a rewrite of “A World for Julius” from the point of view of Vilma the nanny’s son, who, like my mother, is from Ayacucho.”

(Jeremías Gamboa)

Writing outside Peru

I left Peru at 19 to head to Budapest, and there I wrote the first short story I would later publish in Lima, in 1986, which takes place in Arequipa. Three years later I published my first collection of short stories, El desván, and one of them is set in Iceland, a country I have not visited to this day. So I don’t ask myself whether I want to talk about a country; I choose the space that seems most appropriate for what I want to tell—fiction itself—and it is the characters who demand a given form and geography regardless of where I happen to be living or traveling. I understand writing stories and novels as a journey, an exploration of something that obsesses me and that I largely do not know, discovering it through storytelling as I go.

By now, Germany is the country where I have spent the most time, and that fact conditions that three of my novels, La falaz posteridad, Nada que declarar and Estación Delirio, whose co-protagonist is a kind of alter ego, have as their principal setting German cities. But not simply because I happened to be there; rather, the stories that obsessed me and gave rise to those fictions had those cities (Berlin, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, etc.) as inherent settings, though not exclusive; Moscow, Sofia, Tetouan, Madrid, Barcelona and others also appear. Other novels I wrote in Fribourg im Breisgau, such as El copista, or in Cologne like La mujer cambiada, or the more recent Coreografía para trenzas solas between Cologne, Barcelona and Calafell, unfold entirely in Peru, which is their natural “non-negotiable” space.

I’m not exactly sure where I situate myself; perhaps my training as a reader of narrative, outside the realm of the Spanish language, is more steeped in European and Central European literature than in American literature, as may be the case for other Peruvian writers. Because of my fascination with foreign languages and my work in literary translation—primarily from German and Hungarian—and having had the privilege of translating major authors such as W. G. Sebald, Fred Wander, Franz Werfel, Soma Morgenstern, Botho Strauss, Stefan Zweig, among others, and also many excellent poets, and Hungarian writers like Milán Füst or András Forgách, I know they have left a significant mark on my prose, though it may not always be immediately evident.

(Teresa Ruiz Rosas)

On the first illustrated women of Peru

La primera generación de mujeres ilustradas en el Perú es clave para entender los conflictos que, desde mediados del siglo XIX en adelante, provocó la figura de la mujer escritora en el campo intelectual, social y político peruano y latinoamericano. Al ser la escritura un trabajo que se podía hacer desde la esfera doméstica, la literatura funcionó como puerta de entrada de las mujeres al espacio público; fue a partir de la publicación de poemas, cuentos, novelas y artículos de su autoría, que esta generación de ilustradas comenzó a intervenir en espacios de poder público considerados desde siglos como masculinos. Ante las suspicacias y ataques, las letradas articularon diversas estrategias colectivas que les permitieron defender y fortalecer sus proyectos literarios, así como legitimar su autoridad intelectual frente a un público que insistía en verlas como una amenaza al orden social prevaleciente. Para ello recurrieron con astucia al paciente tejido de redes intelectuales nacionales, continentales y trasatlánticas, a la creación de espacios de sociabilidad femenina en veladas literarias, a la fundación de prensa, revistas e imprenta propias, y a la promoción de la educación y el trabajo femenino como requisito indispensable para la construcción de la siempre ansiada modernidad. Clorinda Matto, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Mercedes Cabello, Teresa González, Carolina Freire, entre otras escritoras, participaron activamente desde sus novelas y poemas en los debates sobre la modernización del Perú y convirtieron la escritura en una herramienta de denuncia social y cuestionamiento de las desigualdades de género, raza y clase. Ese rigor crítico las posicionó en abierta resistencia frente a la Iglesia y el Estado, y a la impugnación de un entramado social intrínsecamente patriarcal que validaba la supremacía masculina criolla en la familia, la política, la educación y la cultura. El enfrentamiento tuvo consecuencias mayores: terminó con el exilio de Matto de Turner, el confinamiento de Cabello de Carbonera y el profundo desencanto de muchas escritoras frente a Lima, lo que las llevó a buscar un nuevo centro de vida en Buenos Aires.

(Francesca Denegri)

María José Caro, on the diffusion of Peruvian literature among American countries

I believe the book ecosystem is increasingly alive, and much of that happens on the Internet.

Previously a book existed only where it physically was. Today a reader in Guadalajara or Montevideo learns of its release on the same day and with the ebook reads it that night.

But what I like most is who is recommending it now. We are the authors ourselves, and all the people around us: book podcasts, where real conversations about what is being written here happen; booksellers posting what they have received; editors celebrating books that aren’t even theirs; readers reviewing for pure pleasure. You read someone in Bogotá, you post them, and the next day there are three people in Lima looking for it. And vice versa, all the time.

A circuit has been formed that no longer depends exclusively on cultural supplements or official criticism. It is word of mouth, but continental.

Reading clubs are equally influential, and they are what most astonishes me: people who organize themselves without anyone asking. I have been invited to virtual clubs in places I didn’t even know were reading me. You log in on a Tuesday evening and you are discussing your book with fifteen people from another country.

Most importantly, I think, is that no one has to wait for someone to present a book to them anymore. Readers in the region are meeting on their own, and we are with them.

(María José Caro)

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