The new winner of the Pepe Carvalho Award at the BCNegra Festival, Cuban writer Leonardo Padura on Tuesday vindicated the relevance of Raymond Chandler and Manuel Vazquez Montalban.

The author of Detective Mario Conde’s saga, on Monday received the news of the recognition for his career in the contest that takes place in this city.

At a meeting with journalists, Padura stated that Mario Conde is ‘the grandson of Philip Marlowe and the son of Pepe Carvalho,’ the crime novel characters who are references in the works of US novelist Chandler and Spanish author Vazquez Montalban.

Atypical detectives, nothing orthodox in their methods, Conde, Marlowe and Carvalho appear today in the imagination of the Cuban writer as points of coincidence with two of his teachers.

‘It was Raymond Chandler and Manuel Vazquez Montalban who told me where I could write a Cuban detective novel differently from how it was done on the island,’ he reflected.

From Catalonian migration to Cuba a love story with Barcelona was born in 1990, which in fact also brings him back to give a conference next week to talk about those trips.

On Thursday, Padura will receive the distinction from the Barcelona BCNegra Festival, whose jury highlighted the author as “one of the most prominent voices in current Latin American literature.”

A great protagonist of his works, whether in his detective novels or in his historical ones, genres in which he moves masterfully, which he hybridizes and transforms, to build a work that is as Cuban as it is universal, wrote the jury chaired by Carlos Zanon and made up of Ana Abella, Lilian Neuman, Esteve Riambau, Rosa Ribas and Daniel Vazquez Salles.

Along with Zanón, Argentinean writer Claudia Piñeiro (winner in 2018) broke the news, whom Padura, who arrived recently in Barcelona, described as a colleague and friend.

Padura’s relationship with Barcelona is strengthened by the fact that Tusquets has been his publishing house for the last 25 years and the link between his novel ‘The Man Who Loved Dogs’ and the figure of Ramon Mercader, the murderer of Russian-Soviet politician Leon Trotsky.