Mario Mendoza Zambrano

Biography

Mario Mendoza Zambrano was born in 1964 in Bogotá, Colombia. He studied at the Refous College and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá where he earned an MA in Latin American Literature. Later, he was Professor of Literature at the same university where he studied. He went to Toledo to attend courses of Spanish American literature, and also went to Israel where he lived in Hof Ashkelon. It was after this trip when, on returning home, he began to publish some articles in magazines newspapers Colombian. In the fall of 1997, he worked at James Madison University in Virginia.

After graduating and working as a teacher, Mendoza decided to start his literary career since 1980, combining writing with teaching and collaboration with various cultural media such as newspapers and magazines, among others, Journal Bacánika and El Tiempo. He has taught literature for over ten years.

Thanks to his novel Satanás, Mendoza won the Biblioteca Breve Prize Seix Barral in 2002. He is one of the most renowned Latin American writers today.

About his work

Through the images described in several of his texts, Mendoza, recreates a city of Bogotá that hardly anyone has dared to sketch. This is first introduced in La ciudad de los umbrales, published in 1992. In this novel starts to show the image of Bogotá as "city transvestite" concept he explained later in a discussion held at the Luis Angel Arango Library, in May 2004.

Now, the city that reveals Mario Mendoza in the triptych [Scorpio City (1998), La historia de un asesino (2001) and Satanás (2002)] is a dark muse whose beauty is dark because it condenses infernal and the sacred, the criminal and virtuous, how disgusting and desirable, the painful and unpleasant. A late-century metropolis, who has the strange case of Harry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, as she is multiplicity of overlapping facets in constant tension, is a seductive monster whose essence is not possible to determine whether "deep down from heaven or emerge from the abyss."

The agile and concise prose Mendoza becomes one of the main hallmarks of his own narrative universe, a universe in which it is possible to find beauty in the ugly and disgusting, without trying to cover it up with facile catharsis. Since writing proposes a hyper visceral aesthetic, which fears not travel intricate regions of the human psyche, or skirting the limits of madness.

Mendoza lives taking the pulse of the city, is a literary spokesman Bogotá for the last 20 years. In his novels can be traced neighborhoods, bridges, schools, streets, universities, parks and the changes that have been experiencing the Colombian capital in these decades. Thus, this Bogota author noted for his interest in creating resistance, not form a guild fan of his literary work but apparently forming activists fight like him, through their writings. Then literature, such as resistance to the injustices of the system, to account for the social reality and openly expose to society. Eventually the work of Mendoza is on track to be recognized as a valuable work related to the Colombian urban literature, especially in regard to the representation of the city of Bogotá in Colombia letters.

Novel

Story

Junior Novel

Awards