Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Rodrigo Rey Rosa (born November 4, 1958) is a Guatemalan writer.

Biography

Rey Rosa was born in Guatemala City in 1958 into a middle-class family. He recalled that in his childhood he traveled extensively with his parents throughout Mexico and Central America, as well as through Europe. It wasn't until the age of eighteen that he traveled alone, just after finishing high school, to London, Germany (where he had to work to earn money to continue his travels), and Spain. Jeffrey Gray
Placing the Placeless: a Conversation with Rodrigo Rey Rosa
p. 163–4.

Upon his return, he lived one further year in Guatemala before leaving (in 1979) because of unrest, and emigrated to New York. There he enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, attracted by its summer writing workshop with Paul Bowles in Tangier. Rey Rosa dropped out in 1983.

Rey Rosa has based many of his writings and stories on legends and myths that are indigenous to Latin American as well as North Africa. A number of Rey Rosa's works have been translated into English, including; ''The Path Doubles Back'' (by Paul Bowles), ''Dust on her Tongue'', "The Pelcari Project," ''The Beggar's Knife'', ''The African Shore'', and ''Severina''. Along with his longer writings, he has also written a number of short stories that have been printed in college-level text books, such as "Worlds of Fiction, Second edition" By Roberta Rubenstein and Charles R. Larson. A few of these short stories include ''The Proof'', and ''The Good Cripple''. In the early 1980s, Rey Rosa went to Morocco and became a literary protege of American expatriate writer Paul Bowles, who later translated several of Rey Rosa's works into English. When Bowles died in 1999, Rey Rosa became an executor of his literary estate.

Rey Rosa's early work is concise and restrained, often evoking extreme situations and emotions in ways that require the reader to infer the characters' motives or emotional reactions. This is true of the short stories in ''The Beggar's Knife'', as well as of novels such as ''The Good Cripple'', ''The African Shore'' and the not-yet-translated ''Que me maten si'' and ''Lo que soñó Sebastián''. The novels written after the auto-fictional ''Human Matter'', published in 2009, are more engaged with the social problems of Guatemala, particularly environmental and Indigenous issues. Rey Rosa announced this shift in emphasis with the publication of ''La cola del dragón'', his only book of non-fiction, in which he criticizes the collaboration of the Guatemalan elite with foreign mining companies and drug cartels, and its complicity with the genocide of Indigenous Mayan people. The themes in Rey Rosa's recent novels are influenced by the work of his sister, the environmentalist Magalí Rey Rosa, and by Rey Rosa's friendships with Indigenous Mayan intellectuals.

Feature films

Along with writing novels and short stories, Rey Rosa has created and directed a number of feature films. His first film was "What Sebastian Dreamt," which runs 83 minutes long and was based on his own novel. It premièred at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah in 2004 and has also been shown at the Berlin Film Festival. Because of his works in literature and film, Rey Rosa won Guatemala's National Prize in Literature named after Miguel Asturias who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967. Refusing to accept the cash prize, Rey Rosa used the money to establish the B'atz' Literature Prize for the best work of literature written in an Indigenous language.

Awards and honors

*2004 Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature
*2013 Best Foreign Book Prize, China, for ''Los sordos''.
*2014 Best Translated Book Award, one of two runners-up for ''The African Shore'', translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray
*2015 Premio José Donoso, Chile, for his life's work.

Works

*1986 ''El cuchillo del mendigo'' (''The Beggar's Knife'')
*1991 ''Cárcel de árboles'' (''The Pelicari Project'')
*1992 ''Cárcel de árboles. El salvador de buques''
*1993 ''El salvador de buques''
*1994 ''Lo que soñó Sebastián''
*1996 ''Con cinco barajas''
*1996 ''El cojo bueno'' (''The Good Cripple'')
*1997 ''Que me maten si…''
*1998 ''Ningún lugar sagrado''
*1999 ''La orilla africana'' (''The African Shore'')
*2001 ''Piedras encantadas''
*2001 ''El tren a Travancore''
*2006 ''Caballeriza''
*2007 ''Otro zoo''
*2008 ''Siempre juntos y otros cuentos''
*2009 ''El material humano'' (''Human Matter'')
*2011 '' Severina''
*2012 ''Los sordos''
*2014 ''La cola del dragón: no ficciones''
*2014 ''1986. Cuentos completos''
*2014 ''Otro zoo'' (''Some Other Zoo'')
*2016 ''Tres novelas exóticas''
*2016 ''Fábula asiática'' (''Chaos: A Fable'')
*2018 ''El país de Toó'' (''The Country of Toó'')
*2020 ''Carta de un ateo guatemalteco al Santo Padre''
*2024 ''Metempsicosis''

Rey Rosa's works have been translated into fifteen languages, including English, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Japanese.

References

*"Worlds of Fiction" Second Edition By: Roberta Rubenstein, Charles R. Larson
https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2014-10/some-other-zoo/

External links

Rodrigo Rey Rosa: Biography and Bibliography

Rodrigo Rey Rosa by Francisco Goldman
''Bomb''
El Agua Quieta (Still Water)
- full English translation at The Short Story Project

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rey Rosa, Rodrigo
1958 births
Living people
Writers from Guatemala City
20th-century Guatemalan writers
20th-century Guatemalan male writers
21st-century Guatemalan writers
21st-century male writers
20th-century novelists
20th-century short story writers
21st-century novelists
21st-century short story writers
Guatemalan male novelists
Guatemalan novelists
Guatemalan male short story writers
Guatemalan short story writers