Nona Fernández
| Nona Fernández | |
|---|---|
At FILSA 2015
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| Born |
Patricia Paola Fernández Silanes 23 June 1971 Santiago, Chile |
| Occupation | Actress, writer |
| Notable work | Av. 10 de Julio Huamachuco, La dimensión desconocida |
| Spouse(s) | Marcelo Leonart |
| Awards |
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Patricia Paola Fernández Silanes (born 23 June 1971), better known as Nona Fernández, is a Chilean actress, author, and screenwriter.
The only daughter of a single mother, Nona Fernández grew up in a neighborhood on Matta Avenue near the Bíobío market. It was there that she had her first job, selling used clothes.
Although officially registered with the same name as her mother's dentist, Patricia Paola, everyone called her Nona, the name with which she also signs her works. This came about because at first she spoke little – almost nothing. "The only thing she knew how to say was the monosyllabic, sharp, 'no'." That refusal turned into her child's crutch; she earned the peculiar nickname Nonito in her family. When she grew up, the nickname became Nona.
She studied at the Santa Cruz de Santiago School and later at the Theater School of the Catholic University.
As an actress, she founded the company Merri Melodys, participated in productions of many theater plays, and won a contest of the Chilean-American Cultural Center as best actress.
Fernández participated in a workshop of Antonio Skármeta in 1995, the same year she won the Gabriela Mistral Literary Games. Her stories appeared first in various anthologies of competitions, and her first book of stories came to light in the year 2000: El Cielo. Two years later she published her award-winning novel Mapocho.
On the gestation of that first novel, she said:
I wrote my first novel in a flat in Barcelona, looking at Chile from a distance, and filling pages with crazy interpretations about its homeland history, while my belly grew with a child who was looking for space. I had a son and finished a book at the same time. My son's name is Dante. The book was called Mapocho, like the river that crosses my city, the same one that has moved trash and the dead forever.
Her partner, Dante's father, is the writer and theater director Marcelo Leonart, whom she met when they both studied at the Theater School. Together they own the company La Fusa.
She defines herself with these words: "Actress for pleasure, storyteller for busting balls, for not forgetting what should not be forgotten. Screenwriter of soap operas by necessity, uncomfortable Chilean, and sometimes rabid."
Her work as a television screenwriter is, for Nona Fernández, just a way to make a living. At TVN, she has become head of scripts for El Laberinto de Alicia. She also writes for the series Los archivos del cardenal, based on the cases defended by the Vicariate of Solidarity during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. She worked on the script of Andrés Waissbluth's film 199 recetas para ser feliz, and on the documentary La ciudad de los fotógrafos by Sebastián Moreno.
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