EVENT: News media preview for the opening of the Gabriel García Márquez archive at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.
WHEN: 8:30 a.m., Wednesday, Oct. 21, in the Harry Ransom Center’s Reading and Viewing Room. Media will be asked to check bags prior to entering secure areas.
WHERE: Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin, 21st and Guadalupe streets. There are several university parking garages on campus.
BACKGROUND: In fall 2014 the Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, acquired the archive of Gabriel García Márquez. Spanning more than half a century, the collection includes original manuscript material, predominantly in Spanish, for 10 books such as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967), “Love in the Time of Cholera” (1985) and “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” (2004); more than 2,000 pieces of correspondence, including letters from Carlos Fuentes, Gunter Grass, Plinio Mendoza and García Márquez’s agent, Carmen Balcells; drafts of his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech; more than 40 photograph albums documenting all aspects of his life over nearly nine decades; the Smith Corona typewriters and computers on which he wrote some of the 20th century’s most beloved works; and scrapbooks meticulously documenting his career via news clippings from Latin America and around the world.
On Oct. 21, García Márquez’s archive opens for research. Patrons will be able to access the collection in the Center’s Reading and Viewing Room, and an online finding aid will provide an inventory and description of the collection.
A sampling of materials from the archive has been digitized and will be available online. Visitors can view a display of original highlights from the archive in the Ransom Center’s lobby through Nov. 1.
Directors and staffers — including archivists, curators, librarians and conservators — from the university’s Harry Ransom Center and LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, a partnership between the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, will be available to discuss processing and working with the collection. University faculty members will also be present.
High-resolution images from the archive will be available.
To RSVP for the Oct. 21 media preview, please email publicaffairs@hrc.utexas.edu.
A week after the opening of the archive, UT Austin’s LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections and the Ransom Center will host the symposium “Gabriel García Márquez: His Life and Legacy” Oct. 28–30 in Austin.
International scholars, journalists, filmmakers and former colleagues of García Márquez will speak about his global influence in the fields of journalism, filmmaking and literature. Registration is full, but the symposium panels will be webcast live in English and Spanish via www.hrc.utexas.edu.
Panel topics include “Gabo the Storyteller,” “Global Gabo,” “Gabo the Journalist” and “Cinematic Scribe and Muse.” Panelists hail from Colombia, Mexico and the United States.
Author Salman Rushdie will deliver the opening keynote address on Oct. 28. Journalist and author Elena Poniatowska will provide the closing keynote on Oct. 30.
Follow news and information about the archive and the symposium using the hashtag #garciamarquezUT.
