“To read you have to have a discipline like when you go to the gym, dedicate two or three hours without anyone bothering you or not go to sleep without having read 100 pages,” said Xavi Ayén, editor-in-chief of Culture at La Vanguardia, in an exclusive meeting with subscribers of the newspaper held this afternoon at Casa Seat in Barcelona and which was moderated by the deputy director Enric Sierra.
Xavi Ayén recalled that he joined the editorial staff of La Vanguardia in 1991 as an intern and that he worked in sections such as Cierra, Magazine, Society or the Vang supplement before “falling into Culture and dedicating myself to book information, which is what which I really liked.” Sierra asked him about his reputation for being a machine reading books, to which he responded that over the years the habit develops and that it is like a workout, making that comparison with going to the gym “and reading not just for pleasure.” .
The journalist has highlighted the importance of reading an author’s work before interviewing him “because there is nothing that flatters them more than seeing that you know their work so that they can open up their secrets to you, gain confidence in you and give you something more that they don’t. “Fuck the other journalists.”
Ayén also has a reputation for having a good clinical eye for discovering authors who are not yet well known. “There is a lot of hard work, reading a lot and talking to editors beyond the presentations.” Speaking about this field work, Ayén has revealed how it was possible that, when Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, he was with the writer in his apartment in New York.
A few months earlier he had been with the secretary of the Nobel Prize jury in Stockholm to present a book by him and the photojournalist Kim Manresa about interviews conducted with winners of this award. “When he put the book in his briefcase, I saw that he had several books by Vargas Llosa in French and I asked him about it; He told me that they were in French because it is more similar to Spanish than Swedish, the language in which his colleagues were reading it. “I connected the dots and understood that Vargas Llosa was a finalist.”
Without telling anyone, he arranged so that on the day the Nobel Prize was announced, he could be with the Peruvian writer. And since on that date he was going to be in New York, he convinced the person in charge of him at La Vanguardia to go to the North American city with the argument of interviewing him for the Magazine. “The night before the Nobel Prize was announced, I asked him if I could enter his house if they gave it to him. He told me not to worry but that that train had already passed many years ago.” The next day, after the news, Ayén was able to pass through a rush of journalists in front of Vargas Llosa’s apartment near Central Park, ring the intercom and enter his house. “We were the only newspaper that had Llosa’s photo in his house the day he was awarded the Nobel Prize.”
Ayén, who has interviewed 29 Nobel Prize winners, surely the record in the profession, has told another anecdote about another of the winners: Gabriel García Márquez. “I hadn’t given interviews for 20 years and I entered her house in Mexico as a messenger carrying a suitcase with Carmen Balcells’ Christmas gifts and hoping that, once there, she would give me the interview.” He achieved it with the help of the writer’s wife, Mercedes Barcha. “The interview started with him reluctantly but in the end we spent three and a half hours and the tone changed a lot and he was already very friendly.”
