Jaime Manrique Wins Lifetime Achievement Prize

Jaime Manrique is the 2019 recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, named in honor of the legendary editor of the 1970s and 1980s. Manrique was presented with this $3000 prize at the 31st annual Triangle Awards, a ceremony at the New School in New York City on April 25, 2019. The novelist Peter Cameron, whose Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You won the Ferro-Grumley Award in 2008, presented the award.

Manrique is a Colombian-born novelist, poet, essayist, and translator who writes both in English and Spanish. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. Among his publications in English are five novels: Colombian Gold, Latin Moon in Manhattan, Twilight at the Equator,Our Lives Are the Rivers, and Cervantes Street. He has also published the memoir Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. Manrique’s selected poems were published in Spanish in 2016.

Manrique’s honors include Colombia’s National Poetry Award, a 2007 International Latino Book Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has taught at Columbia University’s MFA program in creative writing and is currently a distinguished lecturer in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at the City College of New York. Manrique’s sixth novel, Like This Afternoon, will be published in June 2019 by Kaylie Jones Books/Akashic Books. He has another new novel in the works, entitled The Rooster from Aracataca.

The Bill Whitehead Award is given to a male-identified writer in odd-numbered years and to a female-identified writer in even years, and the winner receives $3000.