Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Colombian · born 1973

Born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1973 to Alfredo Vásquez and Fanny Velandia, both lawyers, Juan Gabriel Vásquez published his first stories in a school magazine at eight and spent his adolescence absorbed in García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Fuentes. He read law at the Universidad del Rosario, devouring Borges, Cortázar, Joyce, and Woolf on the side, and finished his degree in 1996 with a thesis on revenge in the Iliad. Days after graduating he left for Paris, chasing the ghosts of the expatriate writers who had shaped him, and completed two apprentice novels he later disowned. A creative crisis drove him out of the city in 1999; he spent that year in a farmhouse near Xhoris in the Belgian Ardennes, hunting with his elderly hosts and reading Conrad, Marías, and Chekhov, an immersion that reshaped his sense of what fiction could do. He married Mariana Montoya that September and settled in Barcelona, editing the magazine Lateral and translating Hersey, Hugo, and Dos Passos into Spanish while writing for the city's newspapers. The Informers (2004), which he counts as his true first novel, won him comparisons to Vargas Llosa and Fuentes; twin daughters, Martina and Carlota, were born in Bogotá the following year. The Secret History of Costaguana (2007) reimagined Joseph Conrad's Nostromo as a theft of Colombian history, and The Sound of Things Falling (2011), begun at a writers' retreat in Tuscany, won the Alfaguara Prize and made him, in 2014, the first Latin American to win the International Dublin Literary Award. He and his family returned to Bogotá in 2012 after sixteen years abroad. Reputations (2013) and The Shape of the Ruins (2015), a novel he rewrote twenty six times, cemented his reputation as one of the leading Colombian novelists since García Márquez. He continues to write novels, essays, and journalism from Bogotá.