The Madrid branch of Casa de América, in collaboration with the Embassy of Peru in Spain, will host the first tribute to Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique, who passed away last March, on Monday, May 25.
Author of essential titles such as “A World for Julius,” “The Exaggerated Life of Martín Romaña,” and “My Beloved’s Orchard,” Bryce Echenique was one of the most singular, luminous, and irreverent voices in Spanish-language narrative and the author of a body of work that has profoundly influenced contemporary Latin American literature.
Bryce Echenique constructed an unmistakable literary universe in which irony, melancholy, and humor coexist with a keen eye for memory, love, and human fragility. His writing, deeply oral and vitalistic, transformed the everyday into narrative material of great emotional intensity.
Linked to Spain for long periods of his life, Bryce maintained a close relationship with Madrid’s cultural ecosystem and with the literary institutions that, for decades, have recognized his central place within the Latin American Boom. At Casa de América, he was already honored during the Author’s Week, a series dedicated to essential figures of contemporary Latin American literature, where his work was celebrated alongside that of authors such as Ernesto Sábato, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Roberto Bolaño.
Casa de América, in collaboration with the Embassy of Peru in Spain, is organizing the first tribute dedicated to his life and work. We want to rediscover not only the writer, but also the narrator of lived experience, the author who made nostalgia, humor, and emotional excess a way of understanding the world. His literature, imbued with a unique and recognizable voice, continues to resonate with new generations of readers who find in it a blend of lucidity, tenderness, and audacity.
On March 10th of this year, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, one of the most celebrated Peruvian writers of our time, passed away in Lima. Bryce’s work, comprised of novels, short stories, chronicles, and memoirs, was among the most widely read in Peruvian literature of recent decades internationally. Bryce Echenique was the finest chronicler of the upper class and also a lucid observer of Latin American idiosyncrasies. To remember him, the participants in this dialogue will discuss his life and literary legacy. César FerreiraBryce was a rare mix: a brilliant and neurotic artist, who knew how to be affectionate and beloved. His gentleness was uncommon. He was generous with younger writers. In the early nineties, he read my first novel and commented on it in detail; I still have the letter. It was a boost I’ll never forget. And the beginning of a friendship that lasted until his death. Carlos Franz
Welcome:
– León de la Torre Krais, Director General of Casa de América.
– Embassy of Peru in Spain
– Screening of a video tribute to Bryce Echenique produced by RTVE.
Participants:
– César Ferreira, Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Corresponding Member of the Peruvian Academy of Language.
– Paloma Torres, Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid.
– Carlos Franz, writer and essayist.
– Jorge Eduardo Benavides, novelist, short story writer, and cultural journalist.
Date and time:
– Monday, May 25, 2026, 7:00 p.m.
– Venue:
Ambassadors’ Hall. Free admission until capacity is reached.
