Horacio Castellanos Moya

Life and work

Castellanos Moya was born in 1957 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras to a Honduran mother and a Salvadoran father. His family moved to El Salvador when he was four years old. He lived there until 1979 when he left to attend York University in Toronto.

On a visit home, he witnessed a demonstration of unarmed students and workers in which twenty-one people were killed by government snipers. He left El Salvador that March, but did not go back to Canada for school. Instead, he traveled to Costa Rica and Mexico, where he found work as a journalist. He wrote sympathetically about the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, a political party that formed following the 1932 Salvadoran peasant massacre. He soon, however, grew disillusioned by violent fighting within the party.

In 1991 Castellanos Moya returned to El Salvador to write for a monthly cultural magazine, Tendencias. In 1995 he contributed to the founding of the weekly publication Primera Plana and worked there until 1996. Over the next few years he wrote and published several novels, including Senselessness, The She-Devil in the Mirror, and Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. The protagonist in Revulsion is a Thomas Bernhard-esque character who returns to El Salvador after eighteen years to deliver a 119-page diatribe against the country. The novel enraged some Salvadorans with some calling for a book ban and others throwing the book into fires. Castellanos Moya’s mother received death threats against her son and in 1997 Castellanos Moya fled El Salvador.

Starting in 2002 he lived in Mexico City in self-imposed exile for ten years. He began writing a new novel called Guatemale: Nunca mas! (Never Again!). It was published as Insensatez in 2004. In 2008 the novel became his first work to be translated into English.

Castellanos Moya was granted residencies in a program supported by the Frankfurt International Book Fair (2004-2006) and as a Writer-in-Residence at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh (2006-2008). In 2009, he was a guest researcher at the University of Tokyo. Currently he teaches at the University of Iowa and is a regular columnist for Sampsonia Way Magazine where he "looks for topics that open debates, new perspectives, and controversy."

His first novel, La diáspora, which concerns the struggles of the exiles from the Salvadoran Civil War, won the Premio Nacional de la Novela, awarded by the Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas", in 1988.