The Mandarache Hache Awards announced the finalists for the 2024 edition during the awards gala at El Batel. Meryem El Mehdati, Javier Olivares, Santiago García, Yolanda García Serrano and Juan Carlos Rubio Ruiz are competing for the 2024 Mandarache Award and Mónica Rodríguez, Darío Adanti and Paloma Muiña are the finalists for the Hache Award.
As every year, during the awards ceremony for the 2023 edition held this Friday, in Room A of the El Batel auditorium, the finalist works for the 2024 Mandarache and Hache Awards were announced. An initiative that, as pointed out the mayoress, Noelia Arroyo, present at the event, “is perhaps the biggest cultural secret in southeastern Spain.”
It is, in his opinion, “a project to promote reading aimed at young people that, however, does not focus on youth literature, but rather aims to serve as a bridge to the most diverse literature and to separate reading from the gaze mercantilist that promotes it as simple leisure or evasion».
During the gala, which was also attended by the second deputy mayor, Manuel Padín, and the area councilors and Culture delegate, David Martínez and Carlos Piñana, the mayoress highlighted the increased participation of young people in the 2023 edition , in a year described as “the most participated in the history of the project”, which was made up of almost 7,000 young people organized into reading committees, being “the largest literary jury in the world”. In the 2024 edition, the novel, the theater and the comic will have to compete before the critical gaze of thousands of young people from Cartagenas in Spain, Colombia and Chile who make up the Mandarache Prize jury.
‘Supersaur’, the novel by Meryem El Mehdati (Blackie Books, 2022), ‘The War of the Worlds’, by Javier Olivares and Santiago García (Astiberri, 2022) and ‘Music for Hitler’ by Yolanda García Serrano and Juan Carlos Rubio Ruiz (El toro celeste, 2021) will compete for the 2024 Mandarache Award, won by some 5,000 young people between the ages of 15 and 30.
El Hache, for his part, will decide between ‘Jeans’ by Mónica Rodríguez (Oxford University Press, 2022), ‘The meteorite is us’ by Darío Adanti (Astiberri, 2022) and ‘Heroes Wanted’ by Paloma Muiña Merino (Edebé , 2022), awarded by a jury made up of almost 2,000 young people between the ages of 12 and 14, from the more than 20 participating educational centers in Cartagena in Spain.
The finalists for the next 2024 edition have already expressed to the organization of the project their satisfaction at having been chosen and their commitment to visit Cartagena during the 2023-2024 school year to participate in the different meetings, activities and podcasts around the finalist works. .
Mandarache and Hache Awards Gala 2023
At the 2023 Mandarache and Hache Awards gala, Margaryta Yakovenko and Daniel Hernández Chambers collected their awards, before an audience of 1,400 students out of the almost 7,000 who read and failed the finalist works, in the most participated edition of the municipal program of its nineteen years of history.
‘Desencajada’ by Margaryta Yakovenko and ‘Departamento de Asuntos Mágicos’ by Daniel Hernández Chambers were the works chosen by the young participants from more than 20 educational centers in the municipality of Cartagena in a process of finalist readings that means that the prizes are awarded by the largest literary jury in the world.
This year, the gala counted for the first time in the history of the project with the presence of participating students and teachers from Colombia and Chile representing the international line of the Orillas Mandarache project, in which on the occasion of its I International Congress ‘Cartagenas Lectoras’ , which was held in El Batel, these two commissions representing both countries actively participated throughout the week in the conferences offered, work tables and debate spaces.
The mayoress of Cartagena, Noelia Arroyo, read at the gala a letter sent to her by the mayor of Cartagena de Indias, William Jorge Dau Chamatt, in which he expressed his enthusiasm for this literary project. The mayoress of Cartagena presented the 2023 Mandarache Award to Margaryta Yakovenko. Likewise, Jesús González, deputy director general of the Promotion of Books, Reading and Spanish Letters of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, did the same with the Hache 2023 Award to Daniel Hernández Chambers. The awards are endowed with 5,000 euros and a reproduction of a statuette by the artist Ángel Haro made in the Astus-Prolam workshops.
The Mandarache Awards are part of a reading education project, organized since 2004 by the Cartagena City Council with the main support of the Ministry of Culture and Sports. Each year the finalist works are selected by the project’s so-called Promoter Group, an assembly-based body made up of voluntary citizens, professionals from the world of books and education: secondary school teachers, librarians, booksellers, entertainers and technicians. of Youth.
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