By Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat, Department of Spanish & Portuguese and Director, LACS Program
October 8, 2010
In 1962 a novel called La ciudad y los perros won the Biblioteca Breve Prize sponsored by the editors of Seix Barral, the most dynamic publishing house in Spain at that time. The novel, in which the “perros” of the title does not refer to actual dogs but to the cadets of a military school in Lima, Perú (in English it was translated as The Time of the Hero), brought to prominence a theretofore little-known Peruvian writer who by then was living in Paris, and launched the Boom of the Latin American novel.
