Wave Magazine Online Jacksonville University News Hub
By Lauren Michelle Tidwell ’13
BA English/BFA in Art with Photography Concentration
JU assistant professor of Spanish Jorge Majfud is being praised as one of the current 10 most important Hispanic authors in Impacto Latin News, New York’s oldest Spanish-language weekly newspaper.
The publication, founded in New York in 1967, mentions Majfud as a writer whose “novels have been studied in different universities around the world.”
Majfud has won many research awards, including the Excellence in Research Award in Humanities and Letters in 2006 and the Casa de las Américas prize in 2001. He was a Juan Rulfo Award finalist in 2011. His novels include “La reina de América,” “La ciudad de la Luna” and his most recent, “Crisis.”
The Impacto Latin News article by Nurka Vidal says Hispanic-American authors have produced a peculiar legacy characterized by literature dedicated to social issues such as immigration and human rights.
According to the article, Hispanic literature in the U.S. dates from when the Spaniards settled in the Rio Grande. Spain was the first European country to introduce an oral and a written language in this country. Since the first books published in Spanish in the 18th century, Hispanic literature in the U.S. has been characterized by three major types of expression: the topics of the Mexican people who lived in the West before it became part of the U.S. territories, the literature on the new generations of immigrants, and the literature produced by exiled people.
The article concludes that after knowing the long and diverse history of the Hispanic literature in the U.S., it is much easier to understand the life and literary works of the 10 best Hispanic authors included in the list.
The list includes the following authors: Isabel Allende (Chile), Juan Alborná Salado (Perú), Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba), Ariel Dorfman (Chile), Conrado Espinoza (México), Miguel Piñero (Puerto Rico), Francisco Álvarez Koki (Spain), Jorge Majfud (Uruguay), Tomás Eloy Martínez (Argentina) and Jorge Ramos (Mexico).
Read the full article here.