By Rosalina Oliva
Today, November 25th, is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Domestic Abuse Awareness.
An important day which should be recognised more than it is, in Gibraltar.
Mark Sanchez – who recently received the Cultural Ambassador award at the 2nd Gibraltar Cultural Awards – has been writing about Gibraltar for the last fifteen years. In this period he has published novels, short stories, historical fiction, travelogues, family memoirs, books of essays, as well as shorter pieces for a range of different publications. He also been invited to speak about his books at different European universities and has seen his work discussed and lectured about by European and American academics. Very soon he will be publishing Gooseman, his fourth full-length novel and thirteenth book on a Gibraltar-related subject. As part of the build-up to Gooseman’s release, we will be publishing a series of extracts from some of Mark’s fiction and non-fiction books. Today we are publishing an abridged extract from The Escape Artist, Sanchez’s first novel. Its protagonist and narrator is Brian Manrique, a Gibraltarian civil servant travelling from Gibraltar to Spain via Morocco in the days when the frontier was closed.
Mark Sanchez – who recently received the Cultural Ambassador award at the 2nd Gibraltar Cultural Awards – has been writing about Gibraltar for the last fifteen years. In this period he has published novels, short stories, historical fiction, travelogues, family memoirs, books of essays, as well as shorter pieces for a range of different publications. He also been invited to speak about his books at different European universities and has seen his work discussed and lectured about by European and American academics. Very soon he will be publishing Gooseman, his fourth full-length novel and thirteenth book on a Gibraltar-related subject. As part of the build-up to Gooseman’s release, we will be publishing a series of extracts from some of Mark’s fiction and non-fiction books. Today we are publishing an extract from Bombay Journal, an account of the three years Mark spent in India between 2005 and 2008:
Unmourned And Unvisited - On The British Military Graves Of India
By M.G. Sanchez
Mark Sanchez – who recently received the Cultural Ambassador award at the 2nd Gibraltar Cultural Awards – has been writing about Gibraltar for the last fifteen years. In this period he has published novels, short stories, historical fiction, travelogues, family memoirs, books of essays, as well as shorter pieces for a range of different publications. He also been invited to speak about his books at different European universities and has seen his work discussed and lectured about by European and American academics. Very soon he will be publishing Gooseman, his fourth full-length novel and thirteenth book on a Gibraltar-related subject. As part of the build-up to Gooseman’s release, we will be publishing a series of extracts from some of Mark’s fiction and non-fiction books. We kick off the series today with an extract from his 2015 autobiographical tome Past: A Memoir, in which Sanchez describes an evening walk through Gibraltar's Upper Town Area in the company of the British historian Nicholas Rankin:
By M.G Sanchez
Some call it Castle Street, others Castle Steps. Both names are used synecdochically – inasmuch as they refer to the lower and upper halves of what is essentially the same street. I’ve always thought of it as the Upper Town’s overstretched and somewhat misaligned spine, narrowing one moment and then widening the next, splintering into a succession of ramps and passages, its relentless gradient only broken by the one or two landings that have been mercifully incorporated at different points along its length.
By Humbert Hernandez
Having been invited by the Cultural Agency to participate in the Literature Week ‘An Audience with….’, I first of all want to thank them for providing a window where I could showcase part of my writing.
