Leonardo de la Caridad Padura Fuentes (born October 10, 1955) is a Cuban novelist and journalist best known for his Mario Conde detective novels and for El hombe que amaba a los perros (2009). In 2012, Padura was awarded the National Prize for Literature, Cuba's national literary award. In 2015, he was awarded the Premio Principe de Asturias de las Letras of Spain.[1]
Padura was born in Havana, Cuba on October 10th, 1955. He received a degree in Latin American literature at the University of Havana. He first came to prominence in 1980 as an investigative journalist for the literary magazine Caimán Barbudo. He became known as an essayist, screenwriter, and a novelist.
He wrote his first novel between 1983 and 1984, a love story titled Fiebre de caballos ("Horse Fever").
Padura is best known in the English-speaking world for his quartet of detective novels featuring lieutenant Mario Conde. Collectively titled Las cuatro estaciones (The four seasons), 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 (Vientos de cuaresma literally means "Lenten Winds" and Paisaje de otoño, "Autumn landscape"):
Padura has published five subsequent books featuring Conde, the novella Adiós Hemingway, La neblina del ayer (The Fog of Yesterday, published in English as Havana Fever).,[2] La Cola de la Serpiente (Grab a Snake by the Tail), Herejes (Heretics) and La Transparencia del Tiempo (The Transparency of Time). Adiós Hemingway was Padura's first book to be translated into English, in 2005. The Havana-Cultura website 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.
Paisaje de otoño won the 1998 Premio Hammett of the Asociación Internacional de Escritores Policíacos (International Association of Crime Writers).
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.[3] 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,[4][5] but it did not proceed beyond the development stage.[6] In 2014, BBC Radio broadcast dramatizations of the four stories starring Zubin Varla.
Padura's historical novel El hombre que amaba a los perros (The Man Who Loved Dogs) deals with the 1940 death of wanted fugitive and Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, and the NKVD agent responsible for eliminating him, Ramon Mercader. At almost 600 pages, it is perhaps Padura's most ambitious and accomplished work and the result of more than five years of meticulous historical research. The novel, published in September 2009, attracted publicity mainly because of its political theme. It 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."[7]
Padura's books have been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Greek, and Danish. In 2013, France named him a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.[8]
Padura still lives and writes in his native city of Havana.[9]
"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 (though not liberated from surveillance). 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."[10]
 |
