The Foundation joins in the condolences for the death of Antonio Lozano, novelist and playwright who dedicated his work to the knowledge of the other, to overcoming barriers and to cultural encounter.
Coinciding with the presence in this house of the crime novel authors Carlos Zanón and Jesús Lens, tomorrow we will pay a heartfelt tribute to Lozano, whose departure leaves a deep void in Spanish literature and in this foundation, to which he was closely linked through his book club since 2009.
In his ten years of life, three of his works were treated in Tres con libros (The Ashes of Baghdad, Harraga y A long sleep in Tangier) and even participated in the reading club experience set up by Tres Culturas with the Seville 2 Penitentiary Centre.
Lozano was also the precursor and director of the Festival del Sur-Encuentro teatral Tres Continentes, organised in the Canary Islands town of Agüimes, with which the foundation collaborates very actively.
One of his last appearances at the Foundation's events was at the second edition of the Tres Festival, in April 2018, where he shared a table with Alicia Giménez Bartlett and Jesús Lens, who will be at the presentation of Carlos Zanón tomorrow.
As a humble token of our sorrow for his loss, today we remember the words that Antonio Lozano dedicated to the Tres con libros book club:
For a writer, having the opportunity to share the experience of reading one of his or her books with a group of readers is an extraordinary event. But, of all the ones I have had the opportunity to enjoy, the one at the Fundación Tres Culturas del Mediterráneo is undoubtedly among the most pleasant and emotional I have experienced. There are several reasons for this.
Firstly, because the people who are at the head of the library that organises the reading club are one of those rare beings who live trapped by the love of literature, who exercise the encouragement of reading as a vital mission, who profess an enormous respect - in equal parts - for writer and reader. In short, they turn their workspace into a temple and the activity they carry out there into a ceremony.
It is also true that on my first visit I was enchanted by the place to which I had been invited: the former Moroccan pavilion at the 1992 Seville Universal Exhibition. I had not had the opportunity at the time to visit the great event. I was not familiar with the space to which I had been invited. It is one of the few buildings that have been preserved of those built for the occasion, probably the one that has inherited the best use after the closure of the Exhibition: that of being a meeting place for the three Mediterranean cultures that once lived together in our country. I was captivated by the beauty of the place, I felt that when I crossed the entrance door I was returning to my native Morocco, the country of which I feel I am a citizen without a passport, in the same proportion as the one whose identity card I have. I felt I was a member of that community whose citizenship was defined to perfection by my fellow participants in the last edition of the Tarifa African Film Festival: that of Estrecheño. We could well say that the Fundación Tres Culturas del Mediterráneo is the home of all the estrecheños...
At least that is how I felt when I crossed its threshold for the first time, when I was received by the main custodian of the bibliographic treasures on the shelves of its library, the much loved and admired - this is not mine, but that of all those who know her - Olga Cuadrado.
On that first visit, I was not going to talk about one of my novels, but about a great Senegalese writer, Fatou Diome, who was launching the Reading Club activity with her work El un lugar del Atlántico. That time I introduced the author and moderated the debate following her talk, in front of a large and very interested audience, and I returned to Agüimes - the beautiful Gran Canarian village where I live - with the feeling of having lived an extraordinary experience in an unusual place - the first activity of a reading club that was undoubtedly destined to do great things - and with the desire to return to it as soon as possible.
As luck would have it, my wishes were fulfilled without much delay, because no less than three of my works were read by the members of this exceptional reading community over the course of time. The first of these, The Ashes of Baghdad, is accompanied by a unique memory. The author - me - was accompanied by the novel's protagonist, Waleed Saleh. The novel is based, in fact, on the life of the Iraqi-born professor - today a member of the Department of Arab and Islamic Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid - and the vicissitudes he experienced during his years in Baghdad, being a member of an illegal and persecuted Communist Party until his forced arrival in Spain, passing through the years in Morocco, a life that portrays the struggle against the adversities imposed by governments and states, always overcome on the basis of freedom and dignity as inalienable principles. The presence of the main character of the novel in the reading club gave the meeting an unusual character for an audience accustomed to confronting the authors of the novels read, but which for the first time was doing so at the same time as having the main character of the story in front of them. I keep as an indelible memory those endearing hours of meeting that were accompanied by a snack in which Middle Eastern pastries, that region of the world so dear to Waleed's heart and so well known to him, were the order of the day.
I also had the honour, together with the protagonist of Las cenizas de Bagdad and Olga Cuadrado, some time later, of inaugurating the reading club that the Foundation set up in the Seville Prison. Needless to say, the experience, in front of a packed hall, was one of the most moving and enriching of the many experiences that this beautiful profession of writing has given me.
The next activity in the Fundación's reading club was part of the itinerant mode that the institution gave it. I had the opportunity to make a very pleasant bus trip to Jerez with the readers who had read my novel Harraga on this occasion. There I was introduced by the admired Juan José Téllez. The debate with the Jerez public continued with those who were returning to Seville with us.
A Long Dream in Tangiers was the third novel of mine that the Three Cultures Foundation Reading Club read. For various reasons, I did not have the opportunity to hold the usual meeting with the readers, with whom we did exchange opinions via videoconference. But that first virtual meeting will soon be joined by a personal one that is still pending, with the promise, moreover, that this author will enliven the evening with the preparation of a couscous that will help us to make the journey to the beautiful Mediterranean city that this reading is intended to be.
Returning to the headquarters of the Fundación Tres Culturas del Mediterráneo will be for me, once again, an occasion for celebration, rejoicing and friendship.
Antonio Lozano
Spanish 
English 
French 
Portuguese