Roberto Bolaño (born April 28, 1953, Santiago, Chile—died July 15, 2003, Barcelona, Spain) was a Chilean author who was one of the leading South American literary figures at the turn of the 21st century.
Bolaño’s family moved throughout Chile at the behest of his truck-driver father until 1968, when they settled in Mexico City. A voracious reader who was also dyslexic, Bolaño was a middling student. He dropped out of high school shortly after moving to Mexico City and dedicated himself to poetry and leftist political causes. By his own account, Bolaño returned to Santiago in 1973 to take part in a socialist revolution that many Chileans presumed was impending; while there he was captured by the forces of Augusto Pinochet but was saved from possible death by a former schoolmate who happened to be his prison guard, leading to his release and return to Mexico. However, some of his contemporaries deny this account and insist that he never went to Chile. That one of the signal moments of Bolaño’s life—which was relayed only through his own accounts—is so fraught with uncertainty reflects the central feature of his writing: almost all of the prose he produced was in some way a fictionalized version of his own life history. As such, the line between his biography and his fiction is perpetually blurred.
Bolaño’s literary career began when he published a poetry collection while living in Mexico. In 1977 he left Mexico to travel the world and eventually settled in Spain, where he married and held a series of low-paying jobs while still working on his craft. He turned to prose after the birth of his son in 1990, believing that fiction would be more remunerative than poetry. After producing a series of short stories, he published the novel La pista de hielo (The Skating Rink) in 1993, which he followed with La literatura nazi en América (1996; Nazi Literature in the Americas) and Estrella distante (1996; Distant Star).
Bolaño’s breakthrough work was Los detectives salvajes (1998; The Savage Detectives), which tells the story of a circle of radical Mexican poets known as the “visceral realists.” The book begins as a diary of a young poet new to the group, but it then telescopes into a chronicle of the adventures of the visceral realists’ two founders on their search through Mexico for an elusive poet and their subsequent globe-trotting, as told from the perspectives of more than 50 narrators. The novel made Bolaño a literary star throughout Latin America and won the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize (the Spanish-language equivalent of the Booker Prize). He continued his frenetic writing pace, publishing at least one new book each year, spurred in large part by a looming awareness of his impending death (he was diagnosed with a chronic liver ailment in 1992). Notable among the last volumes published during his lifetime is Nocturno de Chile (2000; By Night in Chile), the searing deathbed rant of a Chilean priest through which Bolaño chastised what he saw as the many failings of his native country, from the Roman Catholic Church to the Pinochet regime. Bolaño died while awaiting a liver transplant in a Barcelona hospital at age 50.
Although he became a well-known and critically hailed author in Spanish-speaking countries following the publication of Los detectives salvajes, Bolaño was not widely translated until after his death. His worldwide literary reputation was made with the posthumous publication of his magnum opus, 2666 (2004). That massive novel is divided into five loosely connected sections, which Bolaño considered publishing separately. The book’s most-acclaimed section, the fourth, details a series of gruesome murders of young women (loosely based on actual murders that took place in Juárez, Mexico, at the time of the novel’s setting) through a series of sanitized investigative reports, taking the reader on an unflinching exploration of suffering and grief. After the publication of 2666, nearly all of Bolaño’s earlier Spanish writings were translated into English. A number of additional works were posthumously printed, including the short-story collection El secreto del mal (2007; The Secret of Evil), the poetry anthology La universidad desconocida (2007; The Unknown University), and the novels El tercer reich (2010; The Third Reich) and Sinsabores del verdadero policía (2011; Woes of the True Policeman).