Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile in 1953 and died in Catalonia in 2003. He was widely regarded as the essential Latin American writer of our age. He was best known for his novels (including The Savage Detectives, which won a number of prestigious literary awards, Nocturno de Chile, translated as By Night in Chile, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and his short stories, first published in English in Last Evenings on Earth.
The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world Bolaño's language, alert and always graceful, his way of constructing narratives that are simultaneously disconcerting, brilliant and infinitely immediate, is a form of resisting evil, adversity and mediocrity * Le Monde * ‘Roberto Bolaño's oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century.’ -- Lauren Groff ‘Roberto Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled.’ -- Mariana Enríquez ‘Roberto Bolaño's fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental.’ * Times Literary Supplement *