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Tangiers in Spanish Literature

October 26, 20177:00 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62). 7:00 p.m. Free entry until the event’s capacity is reached.
In Spanish.

At Casa Árabe, María Dueñas, Javier Valenzuela and Antonio Lozano analyze the reasons behind the attraction towards this city found in Spanish literature.

The presence of Moroccan cities in Spain’s cinema and literature narratives has been frequent since the last century because of the close cultural and historical relationship which has existed between Morocco and Spain. Amongst all these places, Tangiers lies at the forefront and has been a source of inspiration for many filmmakers and writers, who have set the plot of movies and novels in every possible genre there. These include extremely well-known works of Spanish literature that have now become classics, including La vida perra de Juanita Narboni (The Vida Perra of Juanita Narboni) by Ángel Vázquez and Reivindicación del conde Don Julián (Count Julian) by Juan Goytisolo. However, this phenomenon, which has turned the city closest to Spain’s coasts into a literary myth remains fully in force today.

The authors invited to take part in this round table discussion, María Dueñas –the author of El tiempo entre costuras (The Time In Between)–; Javier Valenzuela –the author of Limones Negros (Black Lemons)–, and Antonio Lozano –the author of Un largo sueño en Tánger (A Long Dream in Tangiers)– will be analyzing the reasons for the attraction felt for a city whose history, people and streets have helped construct a large part of the best contemporary Spanish literature. The discussion will be moderated by translator Malika Embarek.
Tangiers in Spanish Literature
María Dueñas has a PhD in English Philology and is a professor at the University of Murcia, currently on a leave of absence. Throughout her career, she has taught courses at American universities and taken part in many different educational, cultural and publishing projects. In 2009, she broke into the world of literature with The Time In Between, a novel which has become a huge publishing success in recent years, captivating both readers and critics. The number of copies sold has reached far more than one million. The rights to translate the novel have been assigned for more than 25 languages, and an ambitious television series based on the novel was produced by the Antena 3 network.

Javier Valenzuela, a journalist and writer, has had eleven books published, the latest of which are the novels Black Lemons and Tangerina, both of the “noir” genre and set in Tangiers. Born in Granada in 1954, Valenzuela worked for 30 years at El País, where he was an assistant director and a correspondent in Beirut, Rabat, Paris and Washington. From 2004 to 2006, he was the Director General of International Communication at La Moncloa (seat of the Spanish government), and in 2013 he founded the journal tintaLibre. He lives between Madrid, Tangiers and the Alpujarra Mountains.

Antonio Lozano was born in Tangiers, Morocco. In 1988, while the Cultural Councilman for the town of Agüimes on the island of Gran Canaria, he started up the Festival del Sur-Three Continents Theatrical Encounter. As a novelist, he has authored Harraga, Donde Mueren los ríos (Harraga, Where the Rivers Die) and Preludio para una muerte (Prelude to a Death). He received the International City of Carmona Noir Novel Award for his work El caso Sankara (The Sankara Case, published by Almuzara in 2006). Other works by this author include Las cenizas de Bagdad (The Ashes of Baghdad), La sombra del Minotauro (The Minotaur’s Shadow), Me llamo Suleimán (My Name is Suleiman) and Un largo sueño en Tánger (A Long Dream in Tangiers). In 2015, he had a travel book published with the title of Issa Ber, un viaje por el río Níger (Issa Ber: A trip down the Niger River).

Malika Embarek López. A Spanish-Moroccan and resident of Tangiers by adoption, she holds a degree in Spanish Philology from the Université Mohamed V in Rabat. She is a technical translator and official translator of French, though her true calling is the literary translation of texts which are culturally mixed, like her own life path. With approximately 70 translated works, she mainly devotes her time to translating North African literature written in French (Tahar Ben Jelloun, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Haim Zafrani and Leila Slimani, as well as others). In November of 2015, she was given the International Gerardo de Cremona Translation Award.