A few weeks ago, the Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco received the Cervantes Prize, one of the top international literary prizes and the most important of the Spanish speaking world. Yet, if one is to look for English language translations of his work one would only be able to find, in few libraries, U.S. translations of his poetry and short fiction dating back to the late 1960s to the 1980s. Just as it happens with a significant number of Latin American authors, who are regarded across the region, Spain and beyond, as major contributors to world literature, Pacheco’s work is largely unheard off in Britain. Meanwhile, a list called Bogota 39 is referred to by some of the British public as if it were the most authoritative contemporary canon of Latin American literature. The reality is that such list has nearly no influence whatsoever in the literary world of Latin America and would be pointed out as having crucial omissions and unjustifiable inclusions if it were to be commented on the main Latin American literary periodicals.

Prizes should not be the guide to literary appreciation. Actually, taking literary prizes as reading guidelines could lead to gross overviews of major literary works and overvaluation of writers whose value is yet to be confirmed by time. One has just to think that the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges was not granted the Nobel Prize for Literature. Still, and undoubtedly, Borges’ writings stand today among the most influential works of twentieth century literature, in any language, and, more importantly, remain a pleasurable experience for readers around the world. Simultaneously, several award-winning authors, including many of the Nobel Prize list, evoke almost no interest in our time, or have plainly been forgotten in libraries and are no longer available in bookstores. This is a key point: the markets and the prizes, something as simple as the commercial criterion to translate and publish one author and not another in the English language, could misleadingly shape the image of Latin American literature, just as the literatures of other regions and languages suffer the same experience even locally.

In this context, the literary events organized by Discovering Latin America, like our other cultural events, have the possibility of a privileged niche: that of bringing awareness to the British public of the diversity and richness of Latin American literature from firsthand experience. As it were, a direct bridge, or at least a non-commercial link, between the British public and Latin American literature. We aim, therefore, to build upon what is known and rightly appreciated to and by the British public, but also to offer opportunities to go beyond what the publishers have made available until this moment in the English language. This will build on not the mere local fame of writers, but on works that have proven to deserve attention nationally, regionally and internationally (it is not unusual to find translations of Latin American authors in French, German or non-European languages, rather than in English). The purpose is to take into account, but to go beyond prizes and markets. In this way, Discovering Latin America once again upholds its social aims by way of opening alternative ways of accessing the pleasures of the region’s culture.