The Faculty is delighted to congratulate Carlos Fonseca on being awarded the 2024 Anna Seghers Prize for promising young writers.
Each year the Anna Seghers Foundation honours two young authors, one German and the other Latin American. Anna Seghers fled Nazism in 1941 and took refuge in Mexico, where she lived until returning to East Germany in 1947.
In 2024, the prize, worth €12,500 each, goes to Carlos Fonseca and to the German Johannes Herwig.
Dr Fonseca is the Costa Rican-Puerto Rican author of the novels Coronel Tears, Museo Animal and Austral (MacLehose, 2023). Translated by Megan Mcdowell, Austral is a story that deals with issues concerning memory, extinction and language. On March 17 he will explore these themes at the Cambridge Festival, discussing the overlap between his work as a critic and as a novelist
Born in Costa Rica in 1987, Carlos Fonseca was brought up in Puerto Rico. He was selected by the Hay Festival as part of the Bogotá 39 group (2016), by Granta magazine as one of the 25 best young Spanish-language writers (2021) and by Encyclopaedia Britannica, in 2022, as one of the 20 most promising writers in the world for their series ‘Young Shapers of the Future’.
This month, the German translation of his latest novel will be published by the Wagenbach publishing house. In April he will present Austral in Berlin, Munich, Bremen, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Halle, invited by the Cervantes Institute.
