EXPOLIBRO 2008 CONFIRMS THAT MEXICO WILL BE A GUEST COUNTRY AT THE FAIR  

After three years of work, Guayaquil will open the doors to the 3rd edition of the largest cultural book and reading-related event that has been organized in Ecuador’s history on July 4th. 

More than 100 national and foreign writers, alongside the varied and extent sample of publications from yesterday and today, will be present at the Renovated South Market which is better known as the “Crystal Palace.”  Here, readers will be able to find more than 80,000 titles and choose their favorites, enjoying them over and over again.

Mexico recently confirmed that it will participate with more than 50 meters of stands where they will present different publications.  Guayaquil’s Consul Rodolfo Quintalán confirmed that the Mexican diplomatic body that is located in our country will participate along with the best publishing houses, the Culture Fund and UNAM.

In its third edition, EXPOLIBRO has matured and entered the international circuit of book fairs with force.  The presence of new countries, such as Colombia, Cuba, the United States, Romania, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Spain and Argentina, amongst others, affirms this.

The following international authors have confirmed their presence at the fair (see attached biography):

Jesús Flores Ollague	México
Cecilia Urbina	México
Eraclio Zepeda	México
Enrique Romero Moreno	México
Elva Macías	México
Marcelo Figueras	Argentina
Andrés Neuman	Argentina
Fernando Soto Aparicio	Colombia
Fernando Ayala Poveda	Colombia
Oscar Godoy Barbosa	Colombia
Winston Morales Chavarro	Colombia
Isaías Peña Gutiérrez	Colombia
Eva Rey	España
Monserrat del Amo	España

As in previous years, the activities will include the presentation of different books and their analysis, participation in various forums and discussion tables, talks, theatre, music for children and adults.  All of this will take place in one place and throughout the fair’s ten days.

Marcelo Figueras
(1962 Buenos Aires) is an Argentine novelist who has published 4 novels: 

The Peronist Boy,

The Time Spy  (translated into French),

Kamchatka (translated into Russian, Polish and German, and then to French and Dutch in 2006),

The Warm-up Battle (2006).

Some of his stories were published in anthologies like The Argentine Selection.  He wrote, alongside Marcelo Piñeyro, the script for Burnt Money, (Goya Prize for the best Spanish-language movie and considered one of the best movies in 2000 by the Los Angeles Times).  He also wrote the script for Kamchatka (chosen by Argentina to represent their country at the Oscars and one of the audience’s favorites at the last Berlin Festival); for Dangerous Obsession, one of Argentina’s 2004 box office hits; and for Rosario Tijeras, based on the novel by Jorge Franco (the most viewed Colombian movie ever). He worked for the Clarín newspaper and for magazines like The Journalist,  Humor, and the periodical Caín, which he directed.  He has also worked for the Spanish magazine The Human Planet.  He is currently preparing his first film as a director, a story called Superhero.

Andrés Neuman Galán
(Buenos Aires, January 28, 1977), writer and Hispanic-Argentine column-writer who writes poetry, novels and stories.

Son of exiled musicians, born in Argentina despite being nationalized in Spain; he went to Granada in 1991, where he obtained his university degree in Hispanic Philology.  He has taught Hispano-American literature and has written columns and comic strips for Granada’s newspaper Ideal. 
Since the Alfaguara National Story Contest was initiated in 1995, a significant number of recognitions and literary prizes for poetry and narration have been granted.  Among the most important prizes are the XVII Hiperion Prize for poetry, for the book The Toboggan, or the Spring Prize for novels, for which he was a finalist in 2002 for his novel Life in Windows.
His work with short stories as coordinator of the Small resistances project, a tetralogy of stories written in Spanish, is also greatly admired. 

Eraclio Zepeda (Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, 1937)
At the age of 22, when he started his political life, first as the leader of the Worker and Peasant’s Party from his state, and later on as an active member of the Mexican Communist Party, he published his first book of stories, Benzulul, a literary radiography of the life of the indigenous people from the Chiapas highlands.  His detailed stories are created based upon brushstrokes of country sides, feelings and beliefs about death and the exploitation that the indigenous people have been forced to undergo since the time of the ancestors.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Short stories

Three stories (with Carlos Isla and Francisco Salmerón), Veracruz Student Federation, 1960

Benzulul, FCE, 1960

Night-time Assault, Joaquín Mortiz, 1975; FCE, 1978

Benzulul and Night-time Assault, CONACULTA, Mexican Readings, Fourth series, 2000

Flight Hours, Motherland, 2005  

Novel

The Big Rain, FCE, 2005

Poetry

The Rebellious Peg (collection), FCE, Mexican Letters, 1960

Asela, La Tertulia, Cuba, 1962

Combat Company, UNEAC, Cuba, 1963

Lament for Rubén Jaramillo, FCE, 1963

Occupation of the Word (collection), FCE, Mexican Letters, 1965

Mischievous Relationship (collected poetry), Villicaña, 1986

Chronicles

Historical Landscape of the South East (collection), Azabache/Banco Unión, 1993

Interview: Eraclio Zepeda, UAM-A, Confrontations, No. 16, 1985

Literature for children: A Tango for Hilvanando, SEP/Salvat, 1987

Mice that Fly, SM Editions, 2004  

Plays

Time for Water ICACH Magazine, 1960

Anthology

As Time Passes (stories) Martín Casillas, 1982

Eraclio Zepeda Pocket-Version, U. de G., 1989

Eraclio Zepeda (contemporary story, selection and notes from Jorge von Ziegler), UNAM, No. 44

Fernando Ayala Poveda
(Tunja, Colombia, 1951) Narrator, Essayist, Journalist for Colombian National Radio, author of forty-four books.  He studied Literature and Education at the Javeriana Pontifical University and Languages at the National University of Colombia.  He travelled to France and Spain to specialize in Literature.  Ayala has been a professor of Literature, Economical History and Sociology, Research Methodology, Literature Workshops at the Javeriana University, La Sabana University, the Central University and National Pedagogy University (1982-2004).  He is an ICFES external consultant who evaluates the academic and scientific quality of universities.  Ayala is a distinguished member of the World Association of Police Writers, Promoter of science and essays in Colombia.  He has contributed his essays to the country’s most popular newspapers and magazines.

He emerged onto the literary scene with Black Magic Woman (National Prize for his novel Awasca), and The Dynasty of Silence (National Pereira Prize).  His novel The Gloomy Decade (1982) is a classic novel about Colombian violence, according to Raymond Williams and Seymour Menton.  The Color of Fame was adapted for television by the RCN programmer, which was under the direction of Pepe Sánchez.  A record number of viewers watched this program.  For this book, the National Institute for the Study of Cancer gave him special recognition for his legacy in education and women’s health.

Ayala Poveda’s work is a milestone in contemporary narratives for children.  At a very young age, he chose to follow the arts to mold his spirit.  This is when he derived his vocation for stories that are full of music, humor, celebration and tenderness.  Each of his tales celebrates the communion of school, the cosmic tree, white horses and the sand clock, where time that was given to men so they may be happy resides.

Fernando Soto Aparicio
Santa Rosa de Viterbo, Boyacá, 1933  
Poet, writer and screenwriter for Colombian television. 

Fernando Soto was born on October 11, 1933 in Santa Rosa de Viterbo.
In August of 1950, Soto published his first work, Hymn to the Motherland.  In 1960, he won an international prize in Madrid for his novel The Blessed and in 1962 the Spanish Language Selection Prize for his work The Rebellion of the Rats.  He also won the House of the Americas Prize in 1970 and the City of Murcia Prize in 1971.


Main Works
The works of Fernando Soto Aparicio explore society in all of its possible aspects, depicting the relationship that individuals have with the different powers (religious, judicial, economical, military).
His repertoire includes novels, poetry books, stories, children’s literature, essays, plays and screenplays for film and television.  Amongst them, you can find:  

The Blessed

While it Rains

The Sullen Mirror

Trip to the Past

The Early Morning Will Start Later 

Long Live the Army 

Trip to Clearness

Camilo´s Harvest

Broken World

Port of Silence

The Rebellion of the Rats 

Walking Path

The Funerals of America 

Brother Man

Alfa Game

Elva Macías
Elva was born in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, in 1944.  She studied at the Lomonósov State University in Moscow, obtaining a degree in Russian Language and Literature.  She has worked for different publications like: Plural, The Fine Arts Magazine, the Cultural Diorama and Soviet Literature, amongst others.  In the city where she was born, she was the coordinator of the Ceiba collection of the Department of Culture, and she was in charge of the Craft House.  She was the assistant director of the Lake House, the director of the Chopo University Museum, coordinator of the Humanities department and the editor who is responsible for the UNAM “Live Voice” CD collection.  Macías obtained the Carlos Pellicer National Prize for the work that he published in 1994, and was a Mexican Writers Center scholar in 1971 and of the Rosario Castellanos Chiapas Literature Prize in 1989.  Her poetry has been included in approximately 40 anthologies.  Amongst her books, you may find: The Next Step (1970), Dream Circle (1975), Image and Similarities (1982), Limited Steps (1985) Far from Memory (1989), Elva Macías, reading material (1992), Guess the Riddle (1992), City Against Heaven (1993), The Future Creates Roots (personal anthology 1993), the Moon Round (1994), and Time to Guess (1999), amongst others. She comes to confirm the accomplishments that her personal certainty has inspired in her work – concentrated and suggestive, precise, cordial and delicate – for more than thirty years.  Poetry understood as a pendant task that reconstructs nature and spirit, an emergency of a being that is lost “amongst the kingdoms” of his own self: an overlook where words simply allude their meanings – pertaining to identity – and the senses of mankind and things – as well as to the identification of the word with the other age that names and surrounds it.

Some of his work includes:

The Parachicos Dance or the Legend of Madame Maria de Angulo

Look For a Magic Mole

Between the Kingdoms

Mobile Empire

The Cambalachera Rat

Oscar Godoy Barbosa
(Born in Ibagué, 1961). Social communicator – journalist from the Externado University of Colombia, he obtained his Masters in Literature at the University of Paris III.  He is a professor of Workshops for Writers at the Central University, as well as in the Department of Humanities and Arts of the same academic institution.  He won the National Workers Story Contest in 1998 with the story “My Thursdays without You,” and the National Pereira City Anniversary Novel Contest in 1999, with his work “Duel of Looks.”  The “Concert for Violin and the Highway” script was chosen for Punch Television’s “Don’t Wrinkle It” contest (2000), and the short film  “Emergency” for the “Let Talent Roll” call of notice of the Ministry of Culture (2001).  His stories have been included in the “Planet Editorial” (2002) anthologies and in the short story contest of the El Tiempo newspaper (2001).

He is currently in charge of writing the newspaper The Republic and resides in Santa Fe de Bogota, Colombia.  This Colombian writer and journalist is the author of the book “Duel of Looks” which was published in the year 2000. 

In this book, we can appreciate a re-encounter with magical Bogota, its neighborhoods which are full of intersections of streets and anonymous looks that are wrapped up in their own destinies, sharing their small worlds that are limited by the silence of absence; paths that intercept without coming close to each other, of their inexorable continuity.
Wet city that brings about love and hate, nostalgia and melancholy, reasons to not live and to never stop dying.   A space that is full of holes in which the characters, who are immersed in the emptiness, portray their own concepts of heaven and hell.
“I invite you to, like me, not only experience these stories that tie and untie: Dare to participate in a duel of looks.  Óscar Godoy Barbosa".

Isaís Peña Gutierrez
(Salado blanco, 1943). He studied Law and Literature, and has published various books about literary creation and criticism, amongst them “Five Story-tellers” (1972), the National Front Generation (1982), Latin American Literature Manual (1987), Write to Breathe (1998), Essays and Passwords in Colombian Literature (2002).  He founded and then directed the Writers Workshop at the Central University.  He is in charge of the Central University institutional magazine “University Sheets,” as well as the Department of Humanities and Arts.  He has given conferences and been a judge for literary contests, within and outside of the country.  He is currently preparing his book “The Universe of Narrative Creativity,” which is about the process of narrative creativity. 

Published Works

Five Story-tellers (1972)

The Block and Site State Generation (1973)

Literature Studies (1979)

Narrative of the National Front (1982)

Manual of Latin American Literature (1987)

Brief History of José Eustasio Rivera (1988)

José Eustasio Rivera (1989)

I Am the Land. Compilation of Texts about Manuel Mejía Vallejo’s Work (1990)

Write to Breathe. Latin America: Essays and Interviews (1998)

Essays and Passwords in Colombian Literature 1967 - 1997 (2002)

The Door and History. Texts (2004)

Enrique Romero Moreno
Romero was born in Mexico City, and he is the author of the book “Hard Tortillas: There Isn’t Even Enough For Beans.”  He appears in the photo presenting his book, which he wrote because he didn’t have any other way to express his frustrations and to help people, since he was also an immigrant.  After writing this book, it became a radio soap opera that circulated throughout 25 states in the United States and “at least 20 Mexican states,” after being then made into a movie.  His book was presented at the Latin American Migrant Communities Summit.  Hard Tortillas: There Isn’t Even Enough For Beans is the first of three books that Enrique Romero has written; the others have equally suggestive titles “It’s Like Toast (Life Up There in the North)” and “If It Happens.”

Further information:

Marcela Holguín Higuera
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OFFICE: 0056 04-2 530994
CELL: 099076613

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