Jorge Valenzuela Garcés is the winner of the 2022 Cope Essay Award

The Qualifying Jury of the VIII Biennial of Essay "2022 Cope Award", selected the work "Un mundo precario. Ensayo sobre la obra y la escritura de Franz Kafka”, with the pseudonym “Odradek”, as the brand new winner of this year's contest. After the opening of the personal data file, it was revealed that it is Jorge Antonio Valenzuela Garcés, who will be a creditor of the Copé Gold Trophy and 50,000 nuevos soles.

The Qualifying Jury of the VIII Biennial of Essay awarded the highest award of a total of 59 works submitted to the competition. From the winning work, the Qualifying Jury points out: “Un mundo precario. Ensayo sobre la obra y la escritura de Franz Kafka” is very well written and adopts the fragmentary character of numerous contemporary essays. As an "open work", he invites the reader to go through various threads that guide Kafka's work and its richness to delve into central issues of the human condition of our time. Thus, he links stylistically with one of the most universal authors: his flow becomes Kafkaesque, recurring and endless.

The finalists of the contest were awarded to the works "República queremos, que solo esta forma nos conviene’: ¿por qué la república en el Perú?" under the pseudonym El caminante solitario, “El país de los Tutaykires. José María Arguedas y el Perú del Futuro” with the pseudonym Rumi, “Diccionario la ingeniosa babel de las palabras” with the pseudonym Marco Aurelio Denegri and “La Atenea Americana. Ensayo sobre una primicia filosófica” with the pseudonym Escotelus.

The winning work of the VIII Biennial of Essay will be published in print by Petroperú under the label Ediciones Copé in 2023 and in digital format in the Virtual Library of the company.

The Qualifying Jury of the VIII Biennial of Essays was made up of Carlos Aguirre from the Ministry of Culture, Marco Martos Carrera from the Peruvian Academy of Language, Agustín Prado Alvarado from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, María Gracia Ríos Taboada from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and Ricardo González Vigil for Petroperú. The recognition ceremony of the winners and finalists will be held in the last week of January 2023, and will be broadcast via the Facebook Live of the Petroperú Cultural Center.

Petróleos del Perú and the Qualifying Jury highlight the great call for works in the 2022 edition of the essay competition and the high level of the works presented and selected. They also thank all participants for their vocation in literary research and creation.

About the winner of the VIII Biennial of Essay – 2022 Cope Award 

Jorge Valenzuela Garcés (Lima, 1962) is one of the most prominent members of the generation of Peruvian narrators of the eighties. He has published the following storybooks: Horas contadas (1988), La soledad de los magos (1994), La sombra interior (2006), Juegos secretos (2011), Infiernos mínimos (2014), El secreto de Marion y otros cuentos. Antología personal (2020) and Ficciones continuas (2021). His stories appear in the most demanding anthologies of the Peruvian story and have been awarded in competitions such as the Story Cope and the José María Arguedas. He has been directing the San Marcos Narration Workshop for 25 years. In the academic field, Jorge Valenzuela obtained a doctorate in Hispanic American Literature from the Complutense University of Madrid. He is currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Literature at the Faculty of Literature of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Sao Paulo, in Brazil; Concepción, in Chile and at the University of Havana. He is a researcher with the National System of Science, Technology and Technological Innovation (SINACYT). He has been awarded the Scientific Merit Award by the Vice-Rectorate of Research in 2014. He is a specialist in Hispanic American fiction. He is the author of a Manual of Hispanic American Literature (2009, 2011) in two volumes; El mundo de los clásicos. Lecturas de Rodó, Stuart Mill y Vargas Llosa (2012); Principios comprometidos. Mario Vargas Llosa entre la literatura y la política (2013), La ficción y la libertad. Cuatro ensayos sobre la poética de la ficción de Mario Vargas Llosa (2017) and El grupo Narración. 50 años después (2018) in addition to articles of his specialty in Peruvian and foreign magazines. He is a collaborator in El Dominical of El Comercio and in other publications of the medium.

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