Roberto Bolaño
| Roberto Bolaño | |
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| Born | Roberto Bolaño Ávalos 28 April 1953 Santiago, Chile |
| Died | 15 July 2003 (aged 50) Barcelona, Spain |
| Occupation | Writer, poet |
| Language | Spanish |
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos (Spanish: [roˈβerto βoˈlaɲo ˈaβalos]; 28 April 1953 – 15 July 2003) was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes as a "work so rich and dazzling that it will surely draw readers and scholars for ages".The New York Times described him as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation".
Bolaño was born in 1953 in Santiago, the son of a truck driver (who was also a boxer) and a teacher. He and his sister spent their early years in southern and coastal Chile. By his own account, he was skinny, nearsighted, and bookish: an unpromising child. He was dyslexic and was often bullied at school, where he felt an outsider. He came from a lower-middle-class family, and while his mother was a fan of best-sellers they were not an intellectual family. He had one younger sister. He was ten when he started his first job, selling bus tickets on the Quilpué-Valparaiso route. He spent the greater part of his childhood living in Los Ángeles, Bío Bío.
In 1968 he moved with his family to Mexico City, dropped out of school, worked as a journalist, and became active in left-wing political causes.
A key episode in Bolaño's life, mentioned in different forms in several of his works, occurred in 1973, when he left Mexico for Chile to "help build the revolution" by supporting the socialist regime of Salvador Allende. After Augusto Pinochet's coup against Allende, Bolaño was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist and spent eight days in custody. He was rescued by two former classmates who had become prison guards. Bolaño describes this experience in the story "Dance Card." According to the version of events he provides in this story, he was not tortured as he had expected, but "in the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas... I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me." The episode is also recounted, from the point of view of Bolaño's former classmates, in the story "Detectives." Nevertheless, since 2009 Bolaño's Mexican friends from that era have cast doubts on whether he was even in Chile in 1973 at all.
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