The PEN Club Trieste Prizes 2009 conferred to Hugo Beccacece (Argentina) and Tonko Maroević (Croatia)

Tonko


Hugo


It is already known that, due to the present worldwide difficult financial situation, the activities related to the development of the IV International Conference 2009 of the PEN Trieste Centre had to be postponed and – so to speak – diluted in time. We are happy to announce that some realizations are nevertheless under way.

For instance – as already related in Italian - we took an active part to the 75th Congress of International PEN in Linz and had the pleasure to have in Trieste the Argentinian poet Rodolfo Alonso for a poetry reading.

On Saturday 28 November 2009, in the historical Caffè San Marco in Trieste the PEN Trieste Centre has awarded two Prizes in its name to two distinguished writers and poets, following what is already a small tradition.

In fact, in 2006 a PEN Prize to the career was already presented to Claudio Magris, in 2007 to Boris Pahor and in 2008 to Renzo Rosso.

All of that has happened through the years thanks to a strict cooperation with the International Literary Prize Scritture di Frontiera - dedicated this year to Umberto Saba - organized since 1998 by the Association Altamarea of Trieste, Chairperson dr. Rina Anna Rusconi, a co-founder of PEN Club Trieste in 2003 and a member of its steering committee.

This year the choice of PEN Trieste was to honour Hugo Beccacece, an Argentinian writer of Italian ancestry, and Tonko Maroević, a long-time friend and colleague of the PEN Croatia.

Hugo Beccacece is presently editor-in-chief of the argentinian Magazine ADNcultura of the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación. He has hold tenure as a philosophy professor at the National University of B.A. and has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Argentina. He is a writer, an essayist and a poet well known beyond the borders of Argentina. The PEN Trieste Centre intends thus to reward Beccacece’s activity in the field of literature, underlining the importance literary interrelations have in the present world.

Tonko Maroević, a professor at the University of Zagreb and a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, is a renowned Croatian essayist, translator (mostly form Italian) and poet, an expert in Croatian art, an established connoisseur of Italian poetry. He is given the PEN Trieste Prize as an acknowledgment to his long research work in many literary fields.

The PEN Trieste Centre expresses his gratitude towards the Camera di Commercio, Industria e Agricoltura di Trieste and the Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia for their support.