Roberto Bolaño

Born Roberto Bolano Avalos on April 28, 1953, in Santiago, Chile, the son of a truck driver who doubled as an amateur boxer and a mother who worked as a teacher, Bolano spent a restless childhood moving from town to town at the behest of his father's work. In 1968 the family relocated to Mexico City, where the teenage Bolano dropped out of school, haunted bookshops, and immersed himself in poetry. In 1973 he returned to Chile to support Salvador Allende's government, arriving just in time for Pinochet's coup; he was arrested and spent eight days in detention before being released, reportedly recognized and helped by two former classmates who had become guards. Back in Mexico City, he cofounded the Infrarealist poetry movement with the poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, a Dadaist-inflected rebellion against the literary establishment that prized spontaneity, confrontation, and living on the streets. In 1977 he left for Europe, drifting through North Africa and western Europe before settling in Barcelona, where he worked as a dishwasher, campground watchman, and garbage collector while writing obsessively. His novel The Savage Detectives (1998), a sprawling, polyphonic search for a vanished avant-garde poet across continents and decades, won the Romulo Gallegos Prize and made him famous across the Spanish-speaking world. He was already gravely ill with liver disease when he began 2666, the thousand-page posthumous novel about violence, evil, and literary obsession set partly in the killing fields of northern Mexico. He died on July 15, 2003, in a Barcelona hospital, awaiting a liver transplant, at fifty.

In mid-1970s Mexico City, Bolaño and his fellow Infrarealists made a sport of storming the poetry readings of the literary establishment, heckling the poems and, on at least one occasion, shouting down Octavio Paz, the reigning giant of Mexican letters. They wanted to blow up official culture and live poetry instead of publishing it.