El Tercer Paraíso (Premio Alfaguara 2022) / The Third Paradise

"The 2020 quarantine is fast approaching, and the protagonist feels the urge to retire to his cabin on the outskirts of Buenos Aires to face whatever may come in the near future. While he waits, he starts to grow a garden with all kinds of plants and flowers. His love for nature leads him to research the creation of scientific thought, the birth of botany, and the great adventures of European expeditions of the eighteenth century. At the same time, he recalls his family's history, one that was uprooted from its core in Daglipulli, Chile, by the Pinochet dictatorship. Little by little, this unique setting is flooded by the memory of the sweet dahlias that his grandmother Alba used to grow, the exuberant and threatening presence of the Amazon jungle that Humboldt first laid his eyes on in 1799, and the then controlled sale of the hybrids that he now buys in nurseries. In this paradise, and at different degrees of conservation, the natural landscape of the Southern Cone becomes a central character, with its own rhythms and with the footprints left behind by those who tried to settle it. History, botany, and the family's story come together and mark the protagonist's personality, his life choices, and his way of being part of this world."--Provided by publisher.

Cristian Alarcón is a writer and journalist. Since the early 1990s, he has devoted his time to investigative journalism and writing chronicles for the newspapers Clarín, Página 12, Crítica de la Argentina, and for the magazines TXT, Rolling Stone, and Gatopardo. In his books Cuando me muera quiero que me toquen cumbia / Dance for Me When I Die (2003) and Si me querés, quereme transa / If You Love Me, Love Me Transa (2010) he joins literature with urban ethnography turning pressing stories into non-fiction novels. In his book Un mar de castillos peronistas / A Sea of ​​Peronist Castles (2013) he writes travel chronicles and profiles of dissident, subordinate, and marginal characters. In 2012 he founded Anfibia magazine and the Cosecha Roja website. Since then, he has led a process of on-going change and transformation of the Latin American chronicle. There he has experimented with the limits of non-fiction narrative and has taken it to one last experience in the Laboratory of Performative Journalism of Anfibia Magazine. His most recent inquiries are about the relationship between journalism and art. He was a visiting professor at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Austin, Texas, and also at the University of Lille, France. He has been awarded the Samuel Chavkin Prize, the Konex-Diploma of Merit Award in the Chronicles and Testimonies category (2014), and the Profile Award for Freedom of Expression (2019). He is a full professor at the School of Journalism and Social Communication at the University of La Plata, Argentina, and directs the Master's degree program in Narrative Journalism at the School of Humanities in the National University of San Martín, Argentina. His books have been translated into English, French, German, and Polish.