Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño is widely considered the most significant and influential Latin American novelist since Gabriel García Márquez. He was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953, moved to Mexico City with his family in 1968, then returned to Chile in 1973, just a month before Pinochet seized power, and was arrested. After his release he returned to Mexico before moving to Paris and then Barcelona. He wrote ten novels and two collections of short stories as well as poetry before he died at the age of 50, on July 15, 2003. His work is published in the United States by New Directions and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His most recently translated book, Nazi Literature in the Americas, was excerpted in our Fall 2007 issue.