15 May 2012. Volpi will read and take part in a discussion on Wednesday, 23 May at 6.15 p.m. in Room 01-013, as part of the Spanish-language “Literatura y emigración”. The author, who has been awarded several prizes, is a founder member and the best-known exponent of the “generación del crack”, a movement of young Mexican writers who want to signal a change of generations without wanting to break with the Latin American literary tradition at the same time. At the HSG, he will speak about “La invención del otro: Las claves de la ficción autobiográfica”.

From law to literature

Jorge Volpi is one of Latin America’s most distinguished writers. His works have been translated into numerous languages and have been awarded prestigious prizes. The 43-year-old author read law at the National University in Mexico City and turned to literature soon after. While he was writing a doctoral thesis on a topic of literary criticism at the University of Salamanca in the 1990s, he also wrote the novel In Search of Klingsor, which was to earn him prizes at an international level and in which he deliberately detached himself from national topoi and homed in on European issues.

“Stateless man of letters”

Inadvertently, the Mexican Jorge Volpi became a “stateless man of letters”. In addition, he joined the “crack generation”. Together with other Mexican writers, he rebelled against the expectations of a mainly European readership that they – because they were Latin Americans – had to follow the epigonic form of the magical realism which Gabriel García Márquez had made internationally famous with his One Hundred Years of Solitude. The “crack generation” pursued an aesthetics of a certain creative rigour and formal perfection, a demanding Latin American literature which requires intelligent readers’ active involvement.