The work of José Soler Puig in the El elogio oportuno series

The 110th anniversary of the birth of novelist José Soler Puig, winner of Cuba’s 1986 National Literature Prize, will be commemorated in the El elogio oportuno series next Thursday at 11:00 a.m. at the Fayad Jamís bookstore, located at Obispo 261 entre Cuba y Aguiar, in Havana’s Historic Center.

At this event, led by journalist and critic Fernando Rodríguez Sosa, essayist, narrator, and professor Pedro Pérez Rivero, along with researcher and professor Yoan Enrique Cartaya Hernández, deputy director of Editorial Letras Cubanas, will take part and assess the work of the author of Bertillón 166, a novel awarded the Casa de las Américas Literary Prize in the first edition of the competition in 1960.

Attendees of El elogio oportuno will be able to listen to excerpts from an interview with Soler Puig conducted by journalist Orlando Castellanos, according to the press release received by Radio Enciclopedia.

Self-taught by training, José Soler Puig — who was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1916 and died in that same city in 1996 — is one of the most significant voices in contemporary Cuban literature.

His bibliography includes, among other titles, the novels En el año de enero, El derrumbe, El caserón, El pan dormido, Un mundo de cosas, El nudo, and Una mujer.

El elogio oportuno — which aims to pay tribute to writers, books, historical events, and institutions reaching milestone anniversaries — takes its name from a Marti aphorism: “Timely praise fosters merit; and the lack of timely praise discourages it,” which appeared in the pages of the newspaper Patria in April 1892.

Translated by Luis E. Amador Dominguez