Leonardo de la Caridad Padura Fuentes is a Cuban novelist and journalist. , he is one of Cuba's best-known writers internationally. In his native Spanish, as well as in English and some other languages, he is often referred to by the shorter form of his name, Leonardo Padura. He has written screenplays, two books of short stories, and a series of detective novels translated into 10 languages. In 2012, Padura was awarded the National Prize for Literature, Cuba's national literary award and the most important award of its kind. In 2015, he was awarded the Premio Principe de Asturias de las Letras of Spain, one of the most important literary prizes in the Spanish-speaking world and usually considered as the Iberoamerican Nobel Prize.
Life and career
Padura, who was born in Havana, took a degree in Latin American literature at the University of Havana. In 1980 he first came to prominence as an investigative journalist in a literary magazine called Caimán Barbudo, a well-established publication that is still published today. He became known as an essayist and a writer of screenplays and in particular, detective novels.
He wrote his first short novel between 1983 and 1984. Titled Fiebre de caballos, it was basically a love story. During the next six years, he continued to work as a journalist, reporting on a wide range of cultural and historical topics. However, around this time he began to write his first novel featuring police officerMario Conde. While he was writing it, Padura realised how fundamental his years as a journalist were to his development as a writer. Firstly it gave him a whole new experience of the country, and secondly, it changed his style with respect to his first book. In 2013, France named him a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Padura still lives and writes in his native city of Havana.
"In one of his essays entitled 'I would like to be Paul Auster,' Padura complains that he would love not to be constantly asked about politics in his country and why he continues living there. But this is very much his niche: he is widely seen as the best writer in Cuba, a country whose best writers were all formed before Castro rule. He offers us an off-the-beaten-path visit of a relatively closed society, a prose that is free of propaganda. By occupying a small but significant critical space in Cuba, Padura becomes more interesting for Cuba observers and more intriguing for students of cultural and literary trends in the island."
Mario Conde books
Padura is best known in the English-speaking world for his quartet of detective novels featuring lieutenant Mario Conde. Collectively titled Las cuatro estaciones, they are sometimes called The Havana Quartet in their English translations. Conde is a cop who would rather be a writer, and admits to feelings of "solidarity with writers, crazy people, and drunkards". These books are set respectively in winter, spring, summer and autumn :
Pasado perfecto
Vientos de cuaresma
Máscaras
Paisaje de otoño
The four books were adapted as four Spanish language television films, which have been released in a group with English subtitles as the Netflix mini-series Four Seasons in Havana. They star Cuban actor Jorge Perugorría and were produced by Tornasol Film. An English-language remake named Havana Quartet was considered by Starz, with Antonio Banderas tagged to act as Conde, but it did not proceed beyond the development stage. BBC Radio broadcast dramatizations of the four stories in 2014. Paisaje de otoño won the 1998 Premio Hammett of the Asociación Internacional de Escritores Policiacos. This prize should not be confused with the similarly named Hammett Prize given by the North American branch of the organization, which is restricted to United States and Canadian authors. Padura has published two subsequent books featuring Conde, the novellaAdiós Hemingway, and a recent novel La neblina del ayer. The comments on the similarities and differences between Padura and Hemingway, and how they might explain Padura's decision to feature the expatriate American in Adiós Hemingway.
Other works
Padura's historical novelEl hombre que amaba a los perros deals with the murder of Leon Trotsky and the man who assassinated him, Ramon Mercader. At almost 600 pages, it is his most accomplished work and the result of more than five years of meticulous historical research. The novel, published in September 2009, attracted a lot of publicity mainly because of its political theme. The novel centres "on Stalin’s murderous obsession with Leon Trotsky, an intellectual architect of the Russian Revolution and the founder of the Red Army", and considers "how revolutionary utopias devolve into totalitarian dystopias." Padura's books are also available in French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Greek, and Danish.
Books
Pasado perfecto, 1991.
Vientos de cuaresma, 1994.
Máscaras, 1997.
Paisaje de otoño, 1998.
La novela de mi vida, 2002.
Adiós Hemingway, 2005.
La neblina del ayer, 2005.
El hombre que amaba a los perros, 2009.
La cola de la serpiente, 2011.
Herejes, 2013.
La transparencia del tiempo, 2018.
Critical studies and reviews of Padura's work
"How to Write from Mantilla, or the Small Heresies of Leonardo Padura," chapter 5 in Yvon Grenier, Culture and the Cuban State, Participation, Recognition, and Dissonance under Communism.