Episode 122: A Centennial Task: Reevaluating Mario Benedetti

Mario Vargas Llosa once said that writers who profess left-wing ideas tend to be much more popular than those who don't. Perhaps he didn't mean Borges, maybe he meant poet, novelist and Latin American icon Mario Benedetti. We invited the indefatigable biographer, critic and translator Adam Feinstein, currently rendering Benedetti's experimental and versed novel El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel, to discuss the various reasons behind Benedetti's enormous popularity in the Spanish speaking world. In doing so, we finished reevaluating his vast and diverse oeuvre in more than one way. Recorded live with music of Joan Manuel Serrat plus wonderful poetry readings by Enrique Zattara and Adam Feinstein himself. Organised by the Uruguayan Embassy together with Cervantes Institute in London as a part of the series Authors in Search of a Reader. Presented by Juan Toledo