Leonardo Padura Fuentes: Cuba's Man of Letters

Leonardo Padura Fuentes (born in Havana in 1955) is the best known and most widely read contemporary Cuban author. He has published eight novels, two volumes of short stories and seven works of non-fiction. He has also written scripts for documentaries and recently for a series of short films about Havana directed by different cinematographers. His work has been translated into at least eight languages, and he has won a number of important prizes including the Dashiell Hammett prize for the best detective novel from the international division of Writers of Crime Fiction (1996) and the Italian Premio Letterario Francesco Gelmi di Caporiacco (2010). His achievement was officially recognised in Cuba in December 2012 when the Cuban Ministry of Culture awarded him the National Prize for Literature, the country's highest literary honour.Padura always wanted to be a journalist. He studied philology and Latin American literature at the University of Havana. His voice as a writer developed as he practised 'literary journalism' in regular columns in one of the national newspapers based on interviews with intellectuals and national cultural figures. Padura is best known for a series of detective novels whose main character, Mario Conde, struggles with his job as a policeman as he yearns to realise his dream of being a writer. Each book develops 'the Count's' relationships with friends from his Havana youth as well as with his wide network of neighbours, associates and professional contacts as he investigates a crime committed in the Cuban capital during the difficult 'Special Period in the Time of Peace' of the 1990s.In each case, Conde encounters characters from various sectors of their society, and each narrative explores an aspect of Cuban social reality. Padura combines a journalist's attention to accurate documenting of the historical period with a novelist's exploration of the motivation of his characters. His vocabulary is subtle, and his dexterity with the Spanish language demonstrates that his talent has been cultivated with extensive training and years of practice. The Mario Conde novels are deftly translated into English by Peter Bush and published in the UK by Bitter Lemon Press. These are available in the US through booksellers and on the Internet.In 1998 Padura visited Coyoacan in Mexico City, including the house in which Leon Trotsky lived for several years before he was murdered in 1940. After dedicating two years to the study of that crime, he began writing. The resulting novel, El hombre que amaba a los perros was first published by Spain in 2009 by Editorial Tusquets in Barcelona, his primary publisher. In 2010 Ediciones Union, the publishing arm of UNEAC, the Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba, put out the Cuban edition. Four thousand copies were printed. About 2,000 of those were reserved for members of that prestigious organisation. The book was presented to the public at the 2011 Book Fair in Havana. In 2012 Padura was awarded the National Prize for Literature.Soon to be published in English in the US (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a branch of Macmillan) as well as in Britain (Bitter Lemon Press), The Man who Loved Dogs has already attracted extensive international attention for Padura's ambitious undertaking. Three central characters in the novel all loved dogs: Ivan, the Cuban writer who opens the book; Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary in exile when the story begins; and Ramon Mercader, Trotsky's assassin who died in Cuba in 1978. It is Mercader who occupies most of the attention of the writer and the reader, and he is the person explicitly referred to in the title.Calling the book a novel offers the author the space to speculate and to create as well as to document. The exile of Trotsky within and then from the Soviet Union after Stalin assumed power is well documented. The life of Mercader can be studied to a certain extent and leaves room for speculation. Ivan is a fictional character. …