At the Pontas Agency we are very glad to announce that the new novel by Basque author Kirmen Uribe, Elkarrekin esnatzeko ordua (The Hour of Waking Together), will be published simultaneously in Spanish (Seix Barral), Catalan (Edicions 62), Galician (Xerais) and in its original language, Basque, (Susa) in November 2016.
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
In 2008, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum acquired a peculiar painting titled «Artists’ Night in Ibaigane» from 1927 by Antonio Gezala, an avant-garde artist, and friend of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. The painting depicts a typical scene of the 1920s, in which the guests drink and dance to the rhythm of a jazz band,which includes a trumpeter, Txomin Letamendi.The novel traces the life of this musician and that of his wife, Karmele Urresti. Letamendi had played with Ravel and Rubinstein in Bilbao Symphonic Orchestra and at night he had his own jazz band. He traveled widely and performed in New York in his youth; but with the arrival of the Spanish Civil War, everything changes. Letamendi is appointed commander of the Republican militia and after the fall of Bilbao, he goes on exile in France, where he meets his future wife, Karmele, also exiled.
They both will take part of the Basque cultural embassy travelling around Europe seeking support for the Republic. Just before the Paris falling into German hands, the couple flees to Caracas, Venezuela. There, Txomin Letamendi is recruited by the Lehendakari José Antonio Aguirre for the Basque secret services, which at that time depended on the US intelligentia, the OSS. The family returns to Europe during the Second World War, and Letamendi makes espionage against the Nazis until he gets arrested in Barcelona, where he is tortured and dies; his body disappears. His wife decides to go back to Venezuela alone, leaving their three children with their grandparents. She will not return to Spain until the death of Franco…
Kirmen Uribe goes back to his roots and explores the history of the Basque country, his motherland, through the life of the Letamendi family. With the neat and poetic prose that so much defines him, Kirmen Uribe pulls out a novel set to become a modern classic.
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Kirmen Uribe (Ondarroa, 1970) is, according to the critics, one of the most relevant writers of his generation in Spain. Bilbao-New York-Bilbao earned him, at 39, the biggest and most prestigious literary distinction for a Spanish author, the National Prize of Literature, confirming him as one of the most interesting and original novelists in Basque and in Spain. The novel has been translated into over a dozen languages, including French (Gallimard), Japanese (Hakusui Sha) and English (Seren Books). It was selected by Foyles as one of the 15 books of the year in the UK in 2014. His second novel, Mussche (What Makes The World Go Around), written during a residency in Sausalito (CA), has been translated into Chinese and Japanese.
His works have been published at several American publications as The New Yorker, Open City, Circumference or Little Star. He has a column at El País Semanal. He writes in Euskera.
More information: Maria Cardona
