In conversation with Eduardo Mendicutti
The Instituto Cervantes in Manchester and Leeds welcomes the Spanish writer Eduardo Mendicutti to this online event in which we will chat with him about his life and complete works, with a special focus on his novel The Bulgarian Boyfriends (1993), which is the book that our Reading Club has been working on in the Autumn 2021 period. The tutor Álvaro González Montero will be in conversation with Mendicutti, and they will also answer questions from the Reading Club participants and all the people in the audience.
Eduardo Mendicutti (Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Cádiz, 1948) is besides being a recognised novelist, a journalist and a television commentator. Homosexuality is usually at the centre of his stories - it is not for nothing that Mendicutti is usually referred to as a homosexual author, or his work framed in gay literature. The Bulgarian Boyfriends is perhaps the novel in which Mendicutti's narrative style, recognizably ironic, scathing and funny, expresses a more melancholic mood.
Mendicutti's first two novels, Tatuaje (1972) and Cenizas (1974) suffered under Franco's censorship after coming first for the Sésamo Prize (1973) and the runner up for the Café Gijón Prize. In 1992 he was a finalist at Spain's National Narrative Award for El palomo cojo, and in 2002 the Andalusian Critics Award for El ángel descuidado.
Álvaro González Montero has a degree in translation and interpreting (English, French and Arabic) from the University of Málaga. He is currently finishing a Master's research project at the University of Leeds that analyzes the construction of identity, especially homosexuality, colonialism and disease, in the diaries of Jaime Gil de Biedma, under the supervision of academics Richard Cleminson and Duncan Wheeler. His research interests include the Spanish Generation of the 50s, newspaper theory, colonialism, and the development of identity in literature.
