Victor Perera (1934-2003), born in Guatemala, authored numerous books, including Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy, The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey, and a novel, The Conversion. For RITES he won the Present Tense/Joel Cavior Award in Biography. He has also been awarded the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship (1980), the PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize (1986), and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writing Award (1992-94). Perera was also a reporter for the New York Times Magazine, a staff member of the New Yorker, and a professor at UC Berkeley. He cofounded Ivri-NASAWI, a national organization celebrating Sephardic arts and culture.
