Cuban authors, Reynaldo García Blanco and Emilio Jorge Rodríguez, were presented with the Casa de las Américas 2017 Award Friday evening.

The two writers won in Poetry and Studies on Black Presence in the Americas and the Caribbean nowadays with their respective works: Esto es un disco de vinilo donde hay canciones rusas para escuchar en inglés y viceversa (This is a Vinyl Record with Russian songs to hear in English and viceversa) and Una suave, tierna línea de montañas azules (A smooth line of blue mountains).

The results were announced yesterday with the attendance of Cuban Culture Minister, Abel Prieto, and the President of the Havana based Casa de las Américas cultural institution, Cuban writer, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and other outstanding intellectuals at the institution’s Ernesto Che Guevara hall.

In the category of novel, Ecuador’s Ernesto Carrión took home the coveted award with Incendiamos las yeguas en la madrugada (Let’s burn the mares at dawn), while in historical-social essay the prize went to América pintoresca y otros relatos ecfrásticos de América Latina (Picturesque America and other tales of Latin America) by Colombian, Pedro Agudelo Rondón.

Other categories in competition were testimony and Brazilian literature, while the José Lezama Lima Honorary Poetry Prize and the Ezequiel Martínez Estrada Essay Award and José Maria Arguedas Narrative Awards went to Raúl Vallejo from Ecuador; Aníbal Quijano from Perú and Pablo Montoya from Colombia.

The Casa de las Américas Literary Prize is one of the most prestigious literary competitions in Latin America and was called for the first time in April, 1959, aimed at encouraging and spreading literature on the continent.