Carlos
Fuentes (1928-2012) was one of the most influential and celebrated
voices in Latin American literature. He was the author of 24 novels,
including Aura, The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo and Terra Nostra,
and also wrote numerous plays, short stories, and essays. He received
the 1987 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary
honor. Fuentes was born in Panama City, the son of Mexican parents, and
moved to Mexico as a teenager. He served as an ambassador to England and
France, and taught at universities including Harvard, Princeton, Brown
and Columbia.
E. Shaskan Bumas is a the author of the story collection The Prince of Tea in China, a finalist for PEN America West Fiction Book of the Year. He teaches at New Jersey City University.
Alejandro
Branger is a writer and filmmaker. He lives in New York City. He is the
co-translator of Carlos Fuentes's novellas Vlad (Dalkey Archive Press,
2012) and Adam in Eden (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013).
Margaret Sayers Peden is a distinguished critic and translator of Latin American literature.
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
Jorge Volpi is the author of nine novels, including In Search of Klingsor, for which he won the Spanish Premio Biblioteca Breve prize and the French Deux-Océans-Grizane-Cavour Prize. Volpi is one of the founders of the "Crack" group—a prestigious Mexican literary movement.
Alfred MacAdam is a professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College and the translator of novels by Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Juan Carlos Onetii, and Julio Cortázar, among others.
