Winning poems of the 2019 COPÉ Award were presented

Starting a cycle of literary events through the Facebook Live platform of the PETROPERU Cultural Center, the winners of the 2019 Copé Award were presented on Tuesday, July 14. The act was chaired by the Chairman of the Board, Eduardo Guevara Dodds, who highlighted the commitment of the state oil company with the promotion of culture and showing his satisfaction for "being able to continue promoting literary creativity, despite the current difficult situation..., as a way of contributing to the development of the country".

The awarded works are "Expediente Vallejo", 2019 Copé Gold Poetry Award, by Johnny Barbieri; "En los bosques de infinita música", 2019 Copé Silver Award for Poetry, by James Quiroz and "Las primeras estaciones", 2019 Copé Bronze Award for Poetry, by Karen Vila.

Johnny Barbieri's work was commented by Dr. Marco Martos, president of the Peruvian Academy of Language, who explained that "Expediente Vallejo" is based on the painful letters that the main national poet wrote to his friend Pablo Abril de Vivero. Taking quotes from those letters as epigraph, Barbieri –in the first part of the book– assumes Vallejo's voice and transforms these letters into poems that express the most difficult feelings with great smoothness. While in the second part the poetic voice changes, which is now that of the author himself, who writes a poetic sequence dedicated to the emblematic places in which Vallejo lived in Paris.

James Quiroz's poetry collection was commented on by the outstanding poet Andrea Cabel, who analyzed the four parts of " En los bosques de infinita música", in which "the poetic Self converses with other poets and musicians... dialoguing not only with style but also with the poetics of each one”; in addition to his allusions to Odysseus and the Buddhist monks. Cabel highlighted the "dark intuition" and the "inner life, full of music" of the texts of this work; as well as "the geographies and stories collected about Peru" in the book.

While Karen Vila's work was commented by the writer Julia Wong Kcomt, who pointed out that the collection of poems is organized around the four European seasons. The work, says Wong, offers a "binary look at what she is and is not" in "Las primeras estaciones", referring to the experience of being a Peruvian migrant in Europe and the tensions that arise between being in Mallorca and Ayacucho. Wong also commented on the books of the other two winners.

The books are available in the Virtual Library of the PETROPERU Cultural Center: https://bit.ly/2WiRmkg