Yuri Herrera

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Yuri Herrera (2015)

Yuri Herrera (born 1970 in Actopan , Hidalgo ) is a Mexican writer.

Life and work

Yuri Herrera studied Political Science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City ( BA , 1997), Creative Writing at the University of Texas El Paso ( MFA , 2003) and was Hispanic in 2009 at the University of California at Berkeley PhD in language and literature. Herrera has worked as visiting professor of Latin American literature at the Universidad Iberoamericana , the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the Tulane University in New Orleans . He published stories, reports and essays in the daily newspapers El País , Reforma and La Jornada , as well as in magazines such as El Malpensante, Letras Libres and El Comité in 1973 . Herrera was the founder and editor of the literary magazine El perro . For his first novel Trabajos del reino (Swan song of the king) he was awarded the Mexican-American prize “Premio Binacional de Novela Joven” in 2003 and the “Otras Voces, Otros ámbitos” prize in 2009.

In Mexico in particular, there are a number of models for dealing with the severe upheavals and rifts in society, according to Herrera in a lecture in August 2013. History is criticized and the future is shaped in a different way. Every literary work - like every work of art in general - assumes a position that implies a certain political stance, for example in the way in which it expresses feelings with a certain zeitgeist . Literature finds a different language for its attitude than sociology or journalism. They decide in new ways what they want to represent as normal and how. Above all, literature that is perceived as political creates a specific space in which completely new topics are formulated in order to view reality with different eyes. It creates opportunities to combine experimental and social criticism.

Herrera drew the attention of Mexican literary critics, especially Elena Poniatowska , with his first novel . According to Edmundo Paz Soldán , Herrera is concerned with showing the relationship between art and violence, because art is not autonomous, but, compared to journalism, has the specific function of expressing certain insights into living conditions ( condición humana ) with fictional means bring to. Herrera reflects on the place art occupies in a society that is dominated by drug trafficking and the values ​​associated with it. Herrera's prose works offer a successful fusion of subject matter and style, according to Eberhard Geisler in his review of The King, the Sun, and Death. Mexican trilogy in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in September 2014. They dealt with the current “harsh reality of the country and the everyday violence of society”, about which he tells soberly and without glorification. Geisler arrives at the impression that the author is very conscious of his linguistic means: if the characters are followed step by step, with a groping beam of light consisting of short sentences in which thoughts are reproduced, language takes the lead. In 2016 Herrera was awarded the Anna Seghers Prize .

Works

Novels and short stories

  • Trabajos del reino . CONACULTA, Mexico DF 2004, ISBN 970-35-0506-6 ; digital edition (2003) [1]
    • Swan of the king. Novel . Translated from the Spanish by Susanne Lange. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-10-033402-2
  • Senales que precederán al fin del mundo . Periférica, Cáceres 2009, ISBN 978-84-936926-9-8
  • Aztlán, DC (cuento) (short story), in: Letras libres , no.139, July 2010
  • La transmigración de los cuerpos . Periférica, Cáceres 2013, ISBN 978-84-92865-69-7
    • The king, the sun, death. Mexican trilogy . Translated from the Spanish by Susanne Lange. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-002255-4 [Consists of the King's Swan song and the two other novels published so far]

Others (selection)

Reviews

  • Eduardo Antonio Parra: Trabajos del reino de Yuri Herrera (Review of the King's Swan song ), in: Letras libres , No. 81, September 2005
  • Pedro Donoso: "Homero vuelve a México" (Review of the King's Abgesang ), in: Revista de libros de la Fundación Caja Madrid , No. 144, December 2008, pp. 49-50.
  • Leopold Federmair: Narcopoesie. A novel by the Mexican Yuri Herrera (review of the King's Abgesang ), Neue Zürcher Zeitung , June 4, 2011

Research literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Yuri Herrera , at Words Without Borders (WWB)
  2. ↑ Literatura política y reconstrucción narrativa; II Encuentro Internacional Telecápita. Colapso y reconstrucción: ¿Podemos inventory un mañana? (Lecture, mp3, 13 minutes), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México , Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Secretaría Académica, August 16, 2013.
  3. ↑ Edmundo Paz Soldán: Literatura, lenguaje y narcoträfico en Mexico: los casos de Yuri Herrera y Elmer Mendoza , in: Ángel Esteban (ed.): Narrativas latinoamericanas para el siglo XXI: nuevos enfoques y territorios . Table of contents Olms, Hildesheim 2010, ISBN 978-3-487-14482-5 , pp. 123-133, pp. 124, 126 and 130.
  4. ↑ Eberhard Geisler: In the cone of light of words , in NZZ , September 13, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Herrera, Yuri
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Mexican writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1970
PLACE OF BIRTH Actopan , Hidalgo