Scenic Rights is the audiovisual co-agency of Arte Público Press.
John Lantigua is a journalist, translator and writer born in the Bronx, in a Spanish-speaking community. However, his cultural life changed dramatically when he moved to New Jersey, to a neighbourhood in which his family was the only latina.
When he was 20, he started to work as a reported at the The Hartford Courant in Connecticut, in which he was the only latino member. He was the one in charge of the sections addressing the Puerto Rican population of the city. Lantigua finally got in contact once again with his original culture.
After several years moving and getting unsuccessful jobs, Lantigua was hired at the The Washington Post when he lived between Honduras and Nicaragua. During those years, the New Yorker wrote his two first novels.
More recently, he joined the The Palm Beach Post, focusing on the migrant workers issues in the States. Thanks to this job, he won two times the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the World Hunger Year Award.
Lantigua’s strong linkage to the Latin-American community has allowed the author to reflect in his novels the many experiences regarding social classes, racial discrimination and latino marginalisation in the US. His mystery novels, starred by the charismatic and tormented Willie Cuesta, are authentic bestsellers that have been largely supported both by the audience and by the critics.
RELEVANT INFORMATION
Lantigua’s novels and short stories, all of them set in latino atmospheres, were nominated to the Edgar Award and the Shamus Award. As a journalist, he obtained several awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize of Journalistic Investigation.
The Willie Cuesta Saga is such a bestseller in the United States. In the novels, Lantigua introduces to the audience a dark ex-private-detective from Little Havana (Miami), as well as the many peculiar and spooky adventures he lives.
