Enrique Lafourcade Valdenegro is a Chilean writer, critic and journalist who was born in Santiago, Chile, on October 14, 1927.
Representative of the so-called "Generation of the 50s", a term suggested by Lafourcade himself in 1954 to describe authors born between 1920 and 1934 who began to flourish in the 1950s and broke apart in content and style from the previous regional style known as "Criollismo"; and more widely within the "boom generation" in Latin America, also known as Latin American Boom, a generation of writers who produced an explosion of works in the mid 20th century and decades that followed, which included four Nobel Prize winners Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala) in 1967, Pablo Neruda (Chile) in 1971, Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia) in 1982, and Octavio Paz (Mexico) in 1990, and several other influential intellectual authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar in Argentina and Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru.
As a writer, Lafourcade has published at least 24 novels (over 30 by some accounts) and over a dozen anthologies and collections of short stories and essays. His novel Palomita Blanca (1971) sold over a million copies, making it one of the all-time best sellers in Chile. This novel was translated to several languages and brought to the screen by Chilean-French director Raúl Ruiz. Lafourcade's latest novel, El Inesperado (2004), imagines the life of French poet Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, and though a work of fiction, it is inspired by the letters of the poet and three years of additional research. The novel was launched on October 20, 2004, matching the 150th anniversary of the birth the poet.