During the Fall 2014 semester, Spanish novelist Antonio Soler was the Writer-in-Residence for the Spanish and Portuguese Department.
Antonio Soler is the author of eleven novels. He has also published
thousands of opinion articles in Diario Sur and El Mundo. He has been
awarded several of Spain's major literary prizes, including the Nadal
Prize for his 2004 novel El camino de los ingleses (later a film
directed by Antonio Banderas, for which Soler himself created the
screenplay), the Premio Primavera in 1999 for El nombre que ahora digo,
and the National Critics Prize in 1997 for Las bailarinas muertas. Soler
was a Dickinson Writer-in-Residence in 2000 and returns fourteen years
later to continue work on his twelfth novel.
Throughout the fall semester, Soler had been working closely with Prof. Mark Aldrich's advanced Spanish class,
"Spanish Literature of the Transition (1968-1998): Encounters with the
Imagination and the Other" as students studied Soler's works along with others from Spanish literature.
On Thursday, November 13, 2014, Soler lead a discussion entitled "En torno a mi proceso creativo: orígenes y trayectoria de Lilí." He read his short story "Lilí" and then discussed it in the context of his creative process.
On Wednesday, December 3, 2014, Soler gave a talk entitled "Contemporary Spanish Culture: 39 years of democracy after 39 years of dictatorship." He spoke about the history of Spain in relation to Spanish literature and culture and gave his analysis on the trajectory of Spanish literature over the years.