Measuring the cultural presence of Latin American writers (1998-2017)
On this page, I try to quantify the “presence” of Spanish-language Latin American writers in different countries.Presence is a simple measure of how well-known a writer is in comparison to other writers, which can be used to quantify relative prominence within a national field or across borders.
I developed this measure for the specific purpose of identifying candidates for my corpus. I wanted to know which Latin American writers could be said to have had an uneven reception—which writers were well-known in Latin America or in their home countries without having had much success in translation during my period of study. But I think the measure also could have value more generally in lending at least one dimension of objectivity to claims about the stature of a given writer in a particular national field.
You can select one country to see the highest presence scores in my corpus for that country during the period of study. Select two countries to compare the culutral presence of writers across borders. Select "Graph" to visualize the data.
For the data presented on this page, presence within a national field was measured in two steps:
- For every writer within the corpus, I took the number of times their full name appears in the periodicals of a given country during a specific time period, according to the journalistic database Factiva.
I used the following search terms and filters for each writer and each country:
- Full name in quotation marks (example “Carlos Fuentes”)
- Keywords designed to exclude as much as possible articles that mention a different person with the same name (example: “and ('novela' or 'escritor' or 'escritora' or 'libro' or 'novelista')” or the equivalent terms in the language of search)
- Period: 01/01/1998 to 12/31/2017
- Source: Specific country (example: Mexico)
- Language: Primary language of that country (Spanish, English, or French)
- I divided each writer's score by the score of the writer with the highest score in that country and multiplied by 100 to make it a percentage.
For example, Carlos Fuentes has the highest score in this corpus for Mexico, so he has a presence of 100% in Mexico.
The study includes 158 authors representing 18 Latin American countries. Some have binationality with Spain or the United States. I focused on authors who primarily write in prose and had at least one indicator of consecration (a prize, inclusion on a critic's list of the “best novels of that past 25 years”) within a Spanish-speaking country after 1980. The list included:
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- Latin American winners of the Premio Rómulo Gallegos
- those Latin American winners of the Premio Cervantes after 1980 who primarily write
- prose fiction
- Latin American winners of the Premio Herralde
- Latin American winners of the Neudstadt Prize writing primarily in Spanish
- Latin American winners of the Premio Alfaguara de Novela
- Latin American winners of the Premio Biblioteca Breve since the prize’s reinstitution in 1999
- Latin American winners and runners-up for the Premio Planeta since 1980
- Latin American winners of Premio Roger Callois since 1980 writing primarily in Spanish
- Latin American winners of the Premio Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
- Latin American winners of the Premio Nadal writing primarily prose fiction
- Latin American winners of the Premio José Donoso writing primarily prose fiction in Spanish
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Any additional writers who did not win prizes but appeared on these lists:
- “25 años en 100 libros : Lista completa del centenar de títulos elegidos por el jurado de Babelia,” published in Babelia on October 28, 2016
- Las 50 grandes novelas latinoamericanas desde 1967” published in Libreta Negra on November 5, 2017
- “¿Cuáles son las cien mejores novelas en Español?”
- “Lista completa de las 100 mejores novelas en castellano del siglo XX,” published in El Mundo in 2001
- “Las mejores novelas latinoamericanas del siglo XXI según libreros de América Latina y España” published in The Huffington Post : España Edition, November 26, 2016
- “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists,” published by Granta in 2010
For each “best” list, I included only Latin American writers whose entry on the list was published after 1980 (except for the Granta list for which I included all the Latin American authors named).
I recognize the arbitrary nature of these “objective” indicators of consecration. The idea was not to create a definitive list of the most important Latin American novelists but to gather the names of a large sample of Latin Americans writing fiction during the Bolaño era that had been celebrated by somebody and then to compare them using the presence measure.
This period represents the 20 years following the publication in Spanish of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, which could be called his “coming out moment” in terms of international recognition. The novel won the Herralde Prize and the internationally prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and in the next few years foreign markets started to take notice and translate Bolaño's books.