PROGRAMA BOGOTÁ39 EN BOGOTÁ

ÁLVAREZ, Carlos Manuel

(Matanzas, Cuba, 1989). Estudió Periodismo en la Universidad de La Habana. En 2016 fundó la revista cubana independiente El Estornudo y sus textos y columnas de opinión han sido publicadas en El País, The New York Times, The Washington Post e Internazionale. En 2017 fue seleccionado por el Hay Festival para la lista de Bogotá 39, que reúne a los 39 mejores escritores latinoamericanos menores de 40 años, y publicó su primera colección de crónicas periodísticas, La tribu. Retratos de Cuba (Sexto Piso). En 2021 recibió el Premio Don Quijote de Periodismo (parte de los premios Rey de España) y fue seleccionado por la revista Granta entre Los Mejores Narradores Jóvenes en Español. Ha publicado las novelas Los caídos (Sexto Piso, 2018) y Falsa guerra (Sexto Piso, 2021). En 2022 obtuvo el Premio de Crónica Anagrama/UANL Sergio González Rodríguez por el volumen Los intrusos, una larga crónica sobre el acuartelamiento de San Isidro, protesta cívica ocurrida en La Habana en noviembre de 2020 que cambió el mapa político sentimental de la isla. En 2023 obtuvo el Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde 2023 por la traducción al francés de su novela Los caídos. Sus libros han sido traducidos a varias lenguas, entre ellos inglés, francés e italiano, árabe y croata.

BÁEZ, Frank

Frank Báez is a Dominican poet and fiction writer, and has published six poetry books, a book of short stories and two works of non-fiction. He was on the Bogotá 39-2017 list of the most promising writers aged 39 or under. His latest book is Lo que trajo el mar.

BORGES POLESSO, Natalia

She is a writer and educator. Born in southern Brazil, she studied English and Portuguese Literature, and has a Master’s in Literature, Culture and Regionalism. She took her doctorate in Literary Theory at the PUCRS, for which she wrote the thesis: Literatura e cidade: cartografias metafóricas e memória insolúvel de Porto Alegre (1897-2013), which passed with summa cum laude. She is the author of Recortes para álbum de fotografia sem gente (2013), and also won the Açorianos Literature Prize, the most important award in Rio Grande del Sur, in the short story category, in 2013. Coração a corda (2015), her second book, presents a selection of poems and short stories in poetic prose. Amora (2015), her latest book of short stories, won the AGES (Associação gaúcha de writeres) award as book of the year in 2016; the Açorianos Literature Prize in 2016; and came first in the 2016 Jabuti Prize.

CAPUTO, Giuseppe

(Barranquilla, 1982) He studied Creative Writing at the University of New York with teachers such as Diamela Eltit, Sergio Chejfec and Antonio Muñoz Molina; and at the University of Iowa with teachers including Horacio Castellanos Moya, Marilynne Robinson and Luis Muñoz. In Iowa he also specialized in Queer and Gender Studies. Un mundo huérfano (2016) is his first novel. Included on the Hay Festival’s Bogota 39-2017 list of the 39 best Latin American fiction writers under 40. He was Cultural Manager of the Bogota International Book Fair, FILBo, between 2015 and 2018. He currently works on the Creative Writing Master’s Programme at the Caro y Cuervo Institute in Bogota. His latest novel is Estrella madre (2020).

CÁRDENAS, Juan

CÁRDENAS, Mauro Javier

Mauro Javier Cárdenas was born and brought up in Guayaquil, Ecuador and studied Economics at the University of Stanford. He is the author of The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press, Sept 2016; Literatura Random House, 2018). His work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Antioch Review, Guernica, Witness, ZYZZYVA and BOMB. He won the 2016 Joseph Henry Jackson Prize.

CARO, María José

(Lima, 1985) A graduate in Social Communication from the University of Lima with a Master’s in Communication Studies from Madrid’s Complutense University. She has published the book of short stories La primaria (2012) and contributed to literary magazines such as Buensalvaje and Vicio absurdo. Her work features in the Palo y Astilla: Padre e hijos en el cuento peruano (2009) anthology and she appeared at the first Lima Imaginada literary event in 2015. She has recently published her last book, Black-Eyed Dog.

CASTAGNET, Martín Felipe

COLANZI, Liliana

(Santa Cruz, Bolivia, 1981). She published the books of short stories Vacaciones permanentes (2010), Nuestro mundo muerto (2016) and Ustedes brillan en lo oscuro (2022). She won the Aura Estrada Literature Prize, Mexico, 2015. She was selected among the 39 best Latin American writers under 40 by the Hay Festival, Bogotá39-2017. In 2022 she won the Ribera del Duero short story prize with the book Ustedes brillan en lo oscuro. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and teaches Latin American literature at Cornell University.
Photo: © Isabel Wagemann

CONSTAÍN, Juan Esteban

Born in 1979 in Popayán, Colombia, in 2004 he published his first book, Los mártires, a collection of fictional works about writers. In 2007 he published El naufragio del Imperio, and in 2010 ¡Calcio!, which won him the Espartaco Historical Novel Prize at Gijon’s Semana Negra. In May 2014, El hombre que no fue Jueves was released, and subsequently it won the Biblioteca Prize for Colombian Fiction. In 2019 he published Álvaro: Su vida y su siglo. His latest work is Cartas abiertas. He writes for El Tiempo newspaper and has three daughters.

Photo: © David Rugeles, courtesy of Diners Magazine

COPACABANA, Lola

ELTESCH, Gonzalo

Gonzalo Eltesch has a degree in Literature and another in Publishing from the Diego Portales University. He has worked as an editor at Penguin Random House since 2008, where he currently holds the position of Literary Manager. His work has been recognized on various occasions, and he was shortlisted for the 2016 Municipal Literature Prize for Colección particular (Libros del Laurel), his first novel, published in September 2015.

ERLAN, Diego

Diego Erlan was born in San Miguel de Tucumán in 1979. Since the 1990s he has lived in Buenos Aires, where he studied Social Communication and Art History. For 14 years he wrote about art, literature and film for Clarín, where he also held the position of editor in the Literature and Books section of Ñ magazine. He has also worked as a university lecturer, television screenwriter and cultural critic for media in Argentina and further afield. In 2009 he coordinated the Manifiesto cycle of aesthetic discussion while he was completing El amor nos destrozará (Tusquets, 2012), his first novel. In 2013 he was shortlisted for the Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Award for his report La larga risa de todos estos años. In 2016 he published his second novel, La disolución (Tusquets). That year he received a National Arts Fund fellowship to write the biography of the Argentinean writer Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, a project that he has been working on for the last five years.

FERREIRA, Daniel

(Colombia, 1981). In 2017, Ferreira was selected as one of the 39 most outstanding authors in Latin America by Hay Festival Bogotá 39. His most recent books are: El año del sol negro (Alfaguara, 2018) and Recuerdos del río volador (Alfaguara, 2022). He was the winner of the Premio Clarín de Novela award in 2014.

Photo: © Alexis Múnera

FONSECA, Carlos

Carlos Fonseca is a Costa Rican-Puerto Rican writer, born in 1987. He is the author of the novels Coronel Lágrimas (Anagrama 2015), published recently in English by Restless Books with the same title, and Museo Animal (Anagrama 2017). He was chosen during the last Guadalajara Book Fair as part of the Ochenteros programme, which is a selection of twenty promising writers born during the 1980s. He has contributed to publications such as The Guardian, Letras Libres, BOMB Magazine, Quimera and Otra Parte. His stories have been included in anthologies such as Estados Hispanos de América (Sudaquia 2016) and Organismos (Sed, 2017), and have been translated into English, French and German. He currently lives in London and lectures in Latin American Literature at Cambridge University.

© Claire Newman Williams

GONZÁLEZ BERTOLINO, Damián

Author of the volume of short stories, El increíble Springer, which won the 16^th Narradores de la Banda Oriental Fiction Prize, and which was published by Ediciones de la Banda Oriental (Montevideo, 2009); this book was later republished by Estuario Editora (Montevideo, 2014) and Editorial Entropía (Buenos Aires, 2015). He has also published the novels El fondo (Estuario, Montevideo, 2013) and Los trabajos del amor (Estuario, Montevideo, 2015). In 2016 he was included in the Guadalajara International Book Fair’s Ochenteros list of twenty new voices in Latin American fiction to look out for. He lives in Punta del Este, where he teaches Literature at the secondary school level. His novel Herodes will be published soon. 

GUTIÉRREZ NEGRÓN, Sergio

A novelist, columnist and translator. He is the author of the novels Palacio (Libros AC, San Juan), which was shortlisted for a PEN Club award in the year of its publication (2011); and Dicen que los dormidos (ICP, San Juan). This second novel won the Puerto Rico Cultural Institute’s National Novel Prize and was later published by the institution in 2014. In 2015, it was given the New Voices Prize for promising Puerto Rican authors at the Festival de la Palabra. That year, the writer was included in the Latinoamérica Viva selection of Latin American novelists chosen by the Guadalajara International Book Fair. In 2016, the New York magazine Brooklyn Rail published a translation of one of his stories as part of a selection of three authors representing recent Puerto Rican literature. He contributes to El Nuevo Día with the monthly column, Buscapié. His stories and essays have appeared in various magazines and anthologies in Puerto Rico and further afield. His lastest novel is Los días hábiles, which has been recently puiblished. 

JAUREGUI, Gabriela

(Mexico City) She is the author of Controlled Decay (Akashic, 2008), and two hybrid genre books, Leash Seeks Lost Bitch (Song Cave, 2015) and ManyFiestas (Gato Negro, 2017), as well as a book of short stories in Spanish La memoria de las cosas, (2015) and the anthologies Tsunami (Sexto Piso, 2018) and Tsunami 2 (Sexto Piso, 2021). She is also the co-author of Taller de Taquimecanografía (Tumbona, 2012). She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, a Master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside, and another in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine. She is the founding editor of the publishing collective Surplus Ediciones in Mexico, is chair of the jury and co-founder of the Aura Estrada Award for young writers and was listed as one of the 39 best Latin American authors under 39 years of age by the Hay Festival’s Bogotá39. She currently lectures in English Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

JUFRESA, Laia

Laia Jufresa grew up in the cloud forest of Veracruz and spent her adolescence in Paris. In 2001, she moved to Mexico City and discovered she didn’t know how to cross a street. She’s been writing fiction ever since. She is the author of the short stories collection El esquinista  (FETA, 2014) and the novel Umami (Literatura Random House, 2015). Umami has been published in seven languages, won the PEN Translates Award, was chosen as the best first novel in Spanish at the 2016 First Novel Festival in Chambéry, France, and is a finalist for The Best Translated Book Award 2017 (USA). Laia was named on the 2015 Mexico20 list of outstanding Mexican writers under 40, and the 2017 Bogota39 of young Latin American writers.

LIBERTELLA, Mauro

LOZANO, Brenda

Fiction writer, essayist and publisher. She studied Literature in Mexico and the United States. She has had writing residencies in the United States, Europe, South America and Japan, has been anthologized on several occasions, has taught university courses and workshops, and has been involved in contemporary art and film projects. She edited the Chicago literary magazine Make and co-organized the art and literature festival Lit&Luz, based in Chicago and Mexico City, from 2013 to 2019. She is co-founder of the Signal imprint of the New York publishing house Ugly Duckling Presse, which focuses on the translation of Latin American poetry into English. Her first novel was Todo Nada (Tusquets, 2009), followed by Cuaderno ideal (Alfaguara, 2014 – published in English as Loop), the book of short stories Cómo piensan las piedras (Alfaguara, 2017), Brujas (Alfaguara, 2020 – published in English as Witches) and Soñar como sueñan los árboles (Alfaguara, 2024). Together with Gabriela Jáuregui she edited Monstrua (UNAM, 2022), an anthology of ten young Mexican writers. She was recognized by Conaculta, Hay Festival and the British Council as one of the most important writers under 40 in her country, and is one of the Bogotá39 list of prominent new Latin American authors. She is on the board of the Aura Estrada Prize and of the National Network of Artists. Her work has been translated into several languages. She writes a column in the newspaper El País and lives in Mexico City.

LUISELLI, Valeria

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award,  and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a Writer in Residence at Bard College and lives in New York City. 

MILLS, Alan

MONGE, Emiliano

Emiliano Monge (Mexico, 1978) has published the books of short stories Arrastrar esa sombra (2008, shortlisted for the Antonin Artaud Prize) and La superficie más honda (2017); the novels El cielo árido (2012, winner of the XXVIII Jaen Novel Prize and of the Otras Voces, Otros Ámbitos Prize), Las tierras arrasadas (2015, winner of the Elena Poniatowska Iberoamerican Novel Prize and an English PEN Award), No contar todo (2018, Fine Arts Prize for Narrative to a Published Work), Tejer la oscuridad (2020), and Justo antes del final (2022). His works have been translated into several languages and recognized by the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the Hay Festival, the British Council, the Bogotá International Book Fair, the PEN Fundation and the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts. Currently, he is a Borchard Foundation scholarship recipient, member of the Mexican SNCA and contributor to the newspaper El País.

OJEDA, Mónica

(Ecuador, 1988) She is the author of the novels La desfiguración Silva (Premio Alba Narrativa, 2014), Nefando (Candaya, 2016), Mandíbula (Candaya, 2018) and Chamanes eléctricos en la fiesta del sol (Random House, 2024), as well as the poetry collections El ciclo de las piedras (Rastro de la Iguana, 2015) and Historia de la leche (Candaya, 2020). Her short stories have been collected in Caninos (Editorial Turbina, 2017) and Las voladoras (Páginas de Espuma, 2020). She has been selected as one of the most relevant literary voices in Latin America by the Hay Festival, Bogotá39 2017 and by the Granta en Español 2021 list.

Photo: © Arianna Montenegro

PLAZA, Eduardo

(La Serena, 1982) is a Chilean writer and journalist, author of the story collection Hienas (2016, Librosdementira). He was shortlisted for the Paula short story competition (2014) and the Gabriela Mistral Literary Games, organized by the Municipality of Santiago (2015).

© Lilian Peromarta

RABASA, Eduardo

RESTREPO POMBO, Felipe

His fiction has been translated into English, French and Italian. He is the author of six books: Retrato de una pesadilla, Nunca es fácil ser una celebridad, 16 retratos excéntricos, Formas de evasión, Perfiles anfibios and Ceremonia. Selected as part of the Bogotá39 list in 2017. In 2021 he received the Simón Bolívar National Journalism Award. He is coordinator of the Anagrama Reporting Award and has previously been the Cultural Editor of Semana magazine and Editor of Arcadia magazine. A collaborator with dozens of international media outlets, he has taught writing workshops in the United States, Mexico and throughout Latin America. He is an occasional columnist for the Spanish-language edition of The Washington Post and El País. He was Editor of Gatopardo magazine for six years.

Photo: © Antonio Cruz

ROBLES, Juan Manuel

ROMERO, Cristian

He studied Audiovisual and Multimedia Communication at the University of Antioquia. In 2015 he received an Artistic and Cultural Creation For Life fellowship from the city of Medellin, in the short story – new writer category. The book he wrote with the fellowship, Ahora solo queda la ciudad (Hilo de plata Editores), was published in 2016. The short story El niño sin brazo belongs to this book. That same year he was shortlisted for the La cueva de Barranquilla Short Story Competition and obtained second place in the Short Stories for Long Waits Competition run by the Pereira Literature Festival. He has published stories in the University of Antioquia magazine.

RONCONE, Juan Pablo

Born in Arica, Chile 1982, and aged nineteen he moved to Santiago. In 2007 he won the Roberto Bolaño Award for Literary Creation with an unpublished novel. In 2011 he published the short story collection Hermano ciervo (Editorial Los Libros Que Leo, 2011; Fiordo Editorial, 2012; Marbot Ediciones, 2012; Sudaquia Editores, 2013; and Laurel Editores, 2014 and 2016), which won the Santiago Municipal Literature Prize. Some of the stories from this book have been translated into English and have appeared in magazines such as New York’s Tweed's, Berlin’s Sand, and the Tel Aviv The Short Story Project, as well as in the Traviesa anthology Childless Parents.

SALDAÑA PARÍS, Daniel

Daniel Saldaña París (Mexico City, 1984) is a writer and translator. He is the author of the book of poems La máquina autobiográfica (Bonobos, 2012; Los Libros de la Mujer Rota, 2019); of the novels En medio de extrañas víctimas (Sexto Piso, 2013), El nervio principal (Sexto Piso, 2018) and El baile y el incendio (Anagrama, 2021, shortlisted for the Herralde Novel Prize), and of the book of narrative essays Aviones sobrevolando un monstruo (Anagram, 2021). In 2017 he was included by the Hay Festival in the Bogotá39 list of the best Latin American writers under 40 years of age; in 2020 he won the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writers’ Award, given by the British Library and the Hay Festival in the UK, and in 2022-2023 he was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.

Photo © Proyecto Análogo

SCHEWBLIN, Samanta

SOTO, Jesús Miguel

SOUSA, Luciana

TORRES, Mariana

Born in Angra dos Reis (Brazil) in 1981, and was brought up there, although she spent much time in Argentina. She currently lives in Madrid.

She has a degree in Screenwriting from ECAM and has been teaching Creative Writing since 2005. She is a partner and founder of the Escuela de Escritores.

Her first short story collection, El cuerpo secreto, was published in Páginas de Espuma in 2015. She has written two feature films: Mudanzas and El refugio. She has also co-written the short film A cara o cruz (2008) and directed the short Rascacielos.

She is part of the European Association of Creative Writing Programmes (EACWP).

She has published stores in a number of anthologies, including Segunda parábola de los talentos (Gens Ediciones, 2011). Her work will be included in the next volume of UNAM’s Sólo cuento.

TRUJILLO, Valentín

ULLOA DONOSO, Claudia

ZUÑIGA, Diego