Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon has won the 2024 Berman Literature Prize, which honors "an author whose works embody the statutes of the Prize, in the spirit of the Jewish tradition and literary works aiming to explore the rich Jewish culture and at the same time exceed times and cultures thereby striving for the universally human." The award is 750,000 Swedish kronor (about $69,000).
Organizers focused on Halfon's novel Canción, published in 2021, in which "an author called Eduardo Halfon is invited to a conference for Lebanese authors in Japan and begins reflecting on his Jewish paternal grandfather's Syrian-Lebanese background and dramatic kidnapping by Guatemalan guerillas in the 1960s."
The jury noted that "with an inimitable sense of style and an impressionistic auto-fictional narrative, [Canción] dissolves every boundary between identity and mask, home and diaspora, past and present."
Jury chairman Daniel Pedersen called the novel "a rich portrayal of how lives are shaped by different layers of identity, how chance and violence affect people, regardless of language or culture. A short novel that manages the feat of uniting the long and broken lines of history."
Halfon was born in Guatemala in 1971 and has lived in the U.S., Spain, France, Germany, and elsewhere. In all his autofictional short novels, including The Polish Boxer (2008), Monastery (2014), Mourning (2017), and Canción (2021), he has explored the multifaceted legacy of the Diaspora and the transformative power of imagination. He lives in Berlin with his family.