140 x 211mm, 317 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2024

Mario Orlando Hamlet Hardy Brenno Benedetti Farugia—otherwise known as Mario Benedetti (1920-2009)—was a Uruguayan novelist, journalist, activist, and poet. A key member of the Generación del 45, Benedetti is oft celebrated throughout Latin America for his ‘direct’ verse, his poetry and prose focusing on complicity, on the acuity of ‘love, anger, and resistance’ in moments of political and civil unrest and upheaval (The Guardian).

A frequent contributor to the Uruguayan weekly, Marcha, Benedetti was instrumental in the establishment of the Frente Amplio / Broad Front movement, which sought to unify left-wing groups in 1960s Uruguay, and his writing has been translated into over eighty languages. Awarded the Reina Sofía Prize for Poetry (1999) and the Ibero-American José Martí Prize (2000), his novels have been adapted for the cinema (see La tregua / The Truce, 1960) and his poetry set to music by such artists as Catalan singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat (notably on Serrat’s album El sur tambien existe / The south also exists, a passionate indictment of US foreign policy).

El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel / Juan Angel's birthday, published by Tenement Press in a first-time English language edition translated and annotated by Adam Feinstein, crystallises its author’s life-long efforts to explore the pluralist politics of care, and individual experience via a monologic study of the quickening of childhood, of innocence, and of adolescence against the backdrop of revolution and Uruguay’s Tupamaro guerrilla movement.

Bilingual (English & Spanish)

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