The members of the jury, made up of writers Eve Gil, Braulio Peralta and Juan José Rodríguez, president, agreed to award unanimously, the Mazatlán Literature Prize 2025 to the book Jardín de noche, by the writer, poet and professor of the UNAM, Fabio Morábito.
The writer will present his book on February 21st at 7:00 pm at Casa Haas and will receive the award and a prize of 100 thousand pesos, awarded by the UAS, during the Evening of the Arts on Saturday, February 22nd, at 8:00 pm at the Ángela Peralta Theater.
In this magical evening, the sublime music of Strauss will transport us to the elegance and sophistication of Imperial Vienna.
The music of Johann Strauss (200 years after the birth of the brilliant composer) will be performed by the Camerata Mazatlán and the guest soloists Jéssika Arévalo (soprano), Andrés Carrillo (tenor), Vanessa Gama (soprano) and Sarah Holcombe (mezzo-soprano), under the direction of maestro Enrique Patrón de Rueda. The Mazatlán Ballet Company will participate, directed by maestro Zoila Fernández. The stage direction is by José Medina.
Press conference
The results of the Mazatlán Literature Prize 2025 were announced today at a press conference held at Casa Haas chaired by Raúl Rico González, General Director of the Instituto Munucipal de Cultura, Turismo y Arte de Mazatlán; writer Juan José Rodríguez; Enrique Vega Ayala, Director of Cultural Planning and Manuel Iván Tostado Ramírez, vice-rector of the UAS in the southern zone.
Rico González highlighted before the media that the Mazatlán Prize for Literature (the first was received by José Gorostiza in 1965) has had an impeccable trajectory throughout its history and according to the winners it has influenced its development, its success and the sale of its books.
Juan José Rodríguez read the deliberative minutes in which the jury states: With Jardín de noche we witness the highest level of an author who has already earned an honorary place in Mexican literature and in the memory of the most demanding readers. Fabio Morábito is one of those creators who never resemble one book to another; a writer who, stylistically, recreates himself without respite and without shame, the members of the jury agree.
It is worth mentioning that Fabio Morábito was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Italian parents. At the age of three, his family returned to Italy and at the age of 15, he moved to Mexico. Despite Italian being his mother tongue, he has written all of his work in Spanish. Several of his books have been translated into German, English, French, Portuguese and Italian. He has received several awards, including the Aguascalientes and Carlos Pellicer poetry awards, the Antonin Artaud and Colima de Narrativa narrative awards, the Xavier Villaurrutia and Roger Caillois awards, awarded by the French PEN, as well as the White Raven award for children’s literature twice (in Munich, Germany).
Writer Braulio Peralta said by telephone that in Jardín de Noche by Fabio Morábito, single women, grandmothers, widows burst in… in an almost forest where they are whipped by doubts about their life, their erotic desires, their dreams of conquest, their fear of remaining alone with their hidden instincts in the middle of a garden that opens at night and the ghosts of the mind appear.
Men do not count in these stories, it is women and their universe that prevail in these stories where there is a literature of imaginative freedom, with almost symphonic poetic touches, where everything is repeated to insist on the complexity of the world, where it is women who have the word.
Fabio Morábito is the writer who is an accomplice who lays bare the thoughts of the feminine soul, commented the writer Braulio Peralta.
I am very honored to receive the Mazatlán Prize for Literature: Fabio Morábito
Through a phone call, writer Fabio Morábito said he was very happy.
“It is a prize with a long tradition, the Mazatlán Prize for Literature has been won by very important writers, and therefore I am very honored to have received it on this occasion,” he said.
What can you tell us about your book?
“It started from a phrase, from a story by the Japanese writer Murakami, which is in a story that I learned about through a student. It is a phrase where a woman is speaking in the first person in the garden of her house, waiting for her husband. I wrote a story, and when I finished the story I realized that this situation gave rise to more stories, and that is how the book was put together, with twelve stories, which all begin in the same way.
Author of poems, short stories and essays, the winner of the Mazatlán Literature Prize 2025 shared that for him, the act of writing is the same as it was centuries ago, that is, the writer is a predominantly solitary being who partially abstracts himself from the reality that surrounds him in order to write like every artist, but at the same time, moving away is a way of assimilating that complexity and sometimes that violence and atrocity of the reality that surrounds us to find a meaning. He believes that what a writer faces today is not very different from what he faced in the last century.
The fact that reality is full of upheavals, often tragedies, it has always been like that, reality has never been placid or benevolent. And probably if it were, literature would not exist either, he said.
During the press conference, the Vice-Rector of the UAS in the southern zone, Manuel Iván Tostado Ramírez, highlighted the university institution’s commitment to being part of these activities that promote the well-being of society.
