Gabriel García Márquez is posthumously awarded the Barcelona City Council Gold Medal
The awards ceremony, which will take place on the 16th of March in the Saló de Cent of the City Council, will be attended by the author’s son, his wife and his literary agent, Carmen Balcells, and can be viewed in streaming
The Barcelona City Council has posthumously awarded the Gold Medal to author Gabriel García Márquez, who came to the city in 1967 and lived for seven years. The award is to be bestowed on the author for his special contribution to the literary heritage of Barcelona and the world in general. The City Council has also proposed naming the Sant Martí de Provençals library after the author.
The essential figure in magical realism, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, García Márquez is one of the 20th century’s most important authors. His relationship with the city of Barcelona was a close one, having not only lived here for seven years but having also written one of his most significant works here, The Autumn of the Patriarch, one of the novels that most precisely captures the figure of the dictator.
While in Barcelona he also coincided with many authors from what is known as the Latin-American boom. Thanks to the help of literary agent Carmen Balcells and publisher Carlos Barral, this group of Latin American authors established Barcelona as their base of operations and produced some of their most emblematic texts. Visitors and residents included the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso and Álvaro Mutis, and the García Márquez residence in Sarrià soon became the meeting place for these and other intellectuals, including Josep Pla, Manual Vázquez Montalbán, Juan Marsé and Óscar Tusquets.
The awards ceremony will take place on the 16th of March in the Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Council and will be attended by García Márquez’s son, Gonzalo García Barcha, his wife, Pía Elizondo, and his literary agent, Carmen Balcells, and speakers will include Jaume Ciurana and the literary director of Penguin Random House, Claudio López de Lamadrid. Following the presentation of the Gold Medal to the author by the mayor of Barcelona, Xavier Trias, the ceremony will conclude with a musical performance by accordion player Mauricio Vilavecchia, guitarist Toti Soler and singer Gemma Humet, who will interpret a series of cumbias, vallenatos and boleros.
The event can be viewed in streaming via the Barcelona Cultura webstite.