Santiago Roncagliolo
| Santiago Roncagliolo | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
March 29, 1975 Lima, Perú |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Language | Spanish |
| Nationality | Peruvian |
| Genre | Novel, Short stories |
| Notable works | Abril Rojo, Memorias de una dama, Pudor |
| Notable awards | Alfaguara de Novela, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize |
| Website | |
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Santiago Rafael Roncagliolo Lohmann (born March 29, 1975) is a writer, screenwriter, translator and journalist. He has written five novels about fear. He is also author of a trilogy of non-fiction books on Latin American twentieth century.
Born in Lima, Peru, Santiago Roncagliolo spent part of his childhood in Mexico, where his family was exiled. As he says: "I grew up in a family of exiles. My classmates were children from Chile, Argentina, Central America or Uruguay. We went to school with shirts of the Sandinista National Liberation Front and played games of "popular war". And above all, we believed that some day we would have a revolution, whatever it was that. But when I returned to Peru, there was already a revolution under way: The Shining Path, and it was not nice. It was made of blackouts, fear, bombs and dead people." There, Roncagliolo met the fear, that is the obsession of all his novels. That experience was also the subject of his novel Red April and his non-fiction book La Cuarta Espada.
Roncagliolo dreamed of becoming a writer. In Lima, reached to publish books for children and a play while working in the Human Rights Commission, until in 2000, he flew to Madrid determined to succeed. He served as a ghostwriter and got the legal residence with a contract for house cleaning. Says the author: "I went to Spain to be a writer, in the wake of the Latin Americans who had triumphed in Europe, such as García Márquez, Vargas Llosa or Jose Donoso. I soon realized losers far outnumber the winners, but no one knows their stories. In honor of all those martyrs of literature, I decided to write the story of a loser". In the end, Roncagliolo actually became a writer in Spain. He currently resides in Barcelona.
In 2006 his novel Red April won the Alfaguara Prize novel. In English, that novel received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It is translated to more than 20 languages.
His non-fiction book Memorias de una Dama (2009) recalls his life as a ghost writer for the daughter of a powerful Dominican family with roots in fascism, mafia and Caribbean dictatorships. But the family censored the book. It was retired from shelves and, still now, his author is forbidden to talk about it.
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Wikipedia