Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Biography

Juan Gabriel Vasquez studied Law in his native city, at the University of Rosario in Bogotá, and after graduating left for France, where he lived in París from 1996 to 1999. There, at the Sorbonne, he received a doctorate in Latin American Literature. Later he moved to a small town in the Ardennes in Belgium. After living there for a year, he moved to Barcelona, where he resided until 2012. Today he lives in Bogotá.

Vásquez is the author of four "official" novels — The Informants (Los informantes), The Secret History of Costaguana (Historia secreta de Costaguana), The Sound of Things Falling (El ruido de las cosas al caer) and Reputations (Las Reputaciones) all of which have been translated by Anne McLean. He wrote two earlier novels in his early twenties which he prefers to ignore - Persona and Alina suplicante. "I would like to leave this part of my past forgotten. I have this right," he has said.

Vásquez won the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Sound of Things Falling. Biblioteca Cosio Daniel Villegas in Mexico City had nominated the book. Vásquez was the first South American writer to emerge victorious from the contest in its history. His translator Anne McLean took some of his money as is customary.

Though he recognizes a debt to Gabriel García Márquez, his work is a reaction against magical realism, saying this with regard to The Secret History of Costaguana: "I want to forget this absurd rhetoric of Latin America as a magical or marvellous continent. In my novel there is a disproportionate reality, but that which is disproportionate in it is the violence and cruelty of our history and of our politics. Let me be clear about this quote, which I suppose refers, in a caringly sarcastic tone, to One Hundred Years of Solitude. I believed that with this novel, and I can say that reading One Hundred Years ... in my adolescence contributed much to my vocation, but I believe that all of the side of magical realism is the least interesting part of this novel. I propose to read One Hundred Years like a distorted version of the Colombian history. That is the interesting part; in what makes One Hundred Years ... with the massacre of the banana workers or the civil wars of the 19th century, not in the yellow butterflies or in the pigs' tails. Like all grand novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude requires us to reinvent the truth. I believe that this reinvention is to make us lose ourselves in the magical realism. And what I have tried to make in my novel is to recount the 19th Century Colombian story in a radically distinct key and I fear to oppose what Colombians have read until now.

Vásquez, who collaborates in diverse reviews and cultural supplements, also writes essays and is a weekly columnist in the Colombian newspaper, El Espectador. He has had critical success including the three cited novels. His stories have appeared in anthologies in different countries and his novels have been translated to various languages. Furthermore, he himself has translated works of John Hersey, Victor Hugo, and E. M. Forster, among others. He was part of the jury of 81 Latin American and Spanish writers and critics who in 2007 elected for the Colombian review, Semana, the best 100 books in the Castilian language in the last 25 years. His novel, Reputations, was published in 2013, with a translation published in English in 2016.

Fiction

Nonfiction

Awards and distinctions