Translation Rights TQE / Prayer for a Poisoned Pope

On August 26, 1978, Albino Luciani, better known as John Paul I, was found dead in the Papal rooms of the Vatican. He had been appointed Pope only 33 days earlier and, on the eve of his death, had shown his secretary the list of bishops and cardinals who were to be immediately dismissed. With the backdrop of Venetian prostitutes, the reader will witness Luciani’s confrontation with very powerful figures, such as Bishop Marcinkus, director of the Vatican bank and also attend a master class offered to catechists by the Pope breaking all possible protocol. Finally we will come to know how, in the end, the ecclesiastical hierarchy applied the “Sicilian solution” to get rid of an uncomfortable Pope.

After exhaustive research, Evelio Rosero has written a beautiful plea, a brilliant literary recreation that brings us close to a Pope who wished above all things to continue being a parish priest and who tried to firmly contain the recurring problems of the Church.

Evelio Rosero was born in Bogota in 1958. He studied Social Communication at the Externado University in Colombia. He is the author of the trilogy “Primera Vez” (“First Time”) made up of the novels Mateo solo (Mateo Alone, 1984), Juliana los mira (Juliana Looks On, 1986) and El incendiado (The Burning Man, 1988, II Pedro Gómez Valderrama Prize to the best Colombian novel published between 1988 and 1992). His later novels, Señor que no conoce la luna (The Man Who Did Not Know the Moon, 1992), Las muertes de fiesta (The Deaths of Feasting, 1995), En el lejero (In the Distance, 2003), and Los almuerzos, which we now make available in Spain, as well as his books of short stories Las esquinas más largas (The Longest Corners, 1998) and Cuento para matar un perro y otros cuentos (To Kill a Dog and Other Stories, 1989) have been the subject of study and of theses. In 2006 he was awarded the National Prize for Literature in Colombia, but it was in 2007 with his novel Los ejércitos (The Armies), winner of the II Tusquets Editores Prize for Novel, that he became internationally known. The novel has been translated into seven different languages and has received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the United Kingdom. About the book, the jury claimed, “It is a novel of love, war and pain written with utmost beauty”.