Carlos Manuel Álvarez is a Cuban writer and journalist. He has won numerous awards for his short stories, including the Nuevas Plumas Ibero-American Fiction Prize in 2015. In 2016 he founded El Estornudo, an independent Cuban magazine of literary journalism. That same year, the Ochenteros programme, run by the Guadalajara International Book Fair, recognized him as one of twenty Latin American authors born in the 1980s to look out for. He has published regularly with media and publications such as the New York Times, the BBC, Gatopardo, El Malpensante and Internazionale. Sexto Piso is soon due to publish La tribu, a collection of essays on post-revolutionary Cuba. He lives in Cuba.
Frank Báez is a Dominican poet and writer. Born in Santo Domingo, his story collection Págales tú a los psicoanalistas won the Santo Domingo Book Fair First Prize for short stories in 2006, his poetry collection Postales won the Salomé Ureña National Poetry Prize in 2009, and another of his poetry collections, Last Night I Dreamt I Was a DJ, was published in a bilingual English-Spanish edition by the US publishing house Jai-Alai Books. In 2016, the Egyptian publisher Safsafa published an anthology of his poetry in Arabic. He has also published three non-fiction books in the volume La trilogía de los festivales, and in July 2017 he published his latest non-fiction work, Lo que trajo el mar. Este es el futuro que estabas esperando (Seix Barral, 2017) is his latest poetry collection.
Natalia Borges Polesso is a Brazilian writer and educator. Born in southern Brazil, she studied English and Brazilian literature, and holds a master’s degree and a doctorate. She is the author of Recortes para álbum de fotografia sem gente (2013), which won the 2013 short story category of the Açorianos Literature Prize, the most important award in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Her second book, Coração à corda (2015), is a selection of poems and poetic short stories. In 2016, her latest short story collection, Amora (2016), won the Açorianos Literature Prize and the Jabuti Prize, Brazil’s most prestigious literary award. She lives in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
Giuseppe Caputo was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 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. His first novel, Un mundo huérfano, was published in Colombia in 2016. He lives in Bogotá.
Juan Cárdenas is a Colombian writer, art curator and critic. He has written several novels: Zumbido (451 Editores, 2010; Periférica, 2017), Los estratos (Periférica, 2013), Ornamento (Periférica, 2015), Tú y yo, una novelita rusa (Cajón de sastre, 2016) and El diablo de las provincias (Periférica). He has also published the short-story collection Carreras delictivas (451 Editores, 2008). His novel Los estratos won the sixth Otras Voces, Otros Ámbitos Prize in 2014. He is currently one of the coordinators of the master’s in Creative Writing at the Instituto Caro y Cuervo in Bogotá, where he works as an educator and researcher.
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, 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. He lives in San Francisco.
María José Caro was born in Lima, Peru, in 1985. She studied Social Communications at the University of Lima and has a master’s degree in Communication Studies from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is the author of ¿Qué tengo de malo? (2017), which won El Comercio newspaper’s Premio Luces, Perro de ojos negros (2016) and La primaria (2012). Her work has been published in Colombia, Chile, Mexico and Peru. She contributes to literary magazines such as Buensalvaje, Vicio Absurdo and El Dominical and her work features in anthologies such as Palo y Astilla: Padre e hijos en el cuento peruano (2010) and Como si no bastase ya ser: 15 narradoras peruanas (2017). She also took part in the first edition of the Lima imaginada literary project in 2015.
Martín Felipe Castagnet is an Argentine writer, editor and translator with a doctorate in the humanities. His novel Los cuerpos del verano (Factotum, 2012) was unanimous winner of the 2012 Latin American Young Writers’ Award organized by the Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et des Traducteurs de Saint-Nazaire, and by La Marelle, Villa des projets d’auteurs, Marseilles, France. It has been translated into French (MEET, 2012) and into English as Bodies of Summer (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017). His second novel, Los mantras modernos, was published in 2017 by Sigilo. He has also published short stories in various publications and completed a number of writing residencies in France, Argentina and Mexico. He lives in Buenos Aires.
Liliana Colanzi is a Bolivian writer who has published the short-story collections Vacaciones permanentes (El Cuervo, 2010) and Nuestro mundo muerto (Almadía, 2016). Nuestro mundo muerto has been translated into English and Italian and was shortlisted for the Gabriel García Márquez short story award (2017). She is the publisher and editor at Dum Dum editora. She won the Mexican Aura Estrada Literary Prize in 2015 and has contributed to publications such as Granta, Letras Libres, Gatopardo, the White Review and El Deber. She lives in Ithaca, New York State, and lectures in Latin American Literature at Cornell University.
Juan Esteban Constaín was 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 won the Biblioteca Prize for Colombian Fiction. He writes for El Tiempo newspaper and has three daughters. He lives in Bogotá.
Lolita Copacabana is an Argentine writer and translator and the co-manager of the Momofuku publishing company (www.momofuku.com.ar). In 2006 she published Buena leche – Diarios de una joven (no tan) formal (Editorial Sudamericana), the first volume of her memoirs, which includes stories written between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three. In 2013 she edited and translated, together with Hernán Vanoli, Alt lit – literatura norteamericana actual (Interzona), a selection of works by young US writers. She is also the author of the novel Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Momofuku, 2015), and in 2015 she translated a book of short stories by the young US writer Paula Bomer: Bebé y otros cuentos (Momofuku). In 2017, she moved to Iowa to begin a master’s degree in Creative Writing.
Gonzalo Eltesch is a Chilean writer and editor who holds degrees in Literature and Publishing from the Diego Portales University. Since 2008 he has been working as an editor at Penguin Random House Chile, 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. He lives in Santiago, Chile.
Diego Erlan is an Argentine writer. For fourteen 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 2013 he was shortlisted for the Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Award for his report ‘La larga risa de todos estos años’. His first novel El amor nos destrozará was published in 2012, followed in 2016 by his second novel, La disolución (Tusquets). That year he received a National Arts Fund fellowship to write the biography of the Argentine writer Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, a project that he has been working on for the last five years. He lives in Buenos Aires, where he works as an editor at the independent publishing house Ampersand.
Daniel Ferreira (San Vicente de Chucurí, Colombia, 1981) is the author of the novels Viaje al interior de una gota de sangre (2012, 2017), Rebelión de los oficios inútiles (2015) and La balada de los bandoleros baladíes (2011). His work has been awarded the Sergio Galindo Latin American Prize for First Novels (2010), the Alba Narrative Prize (2011), and the Clarín Prize for Novels (2014). He has published features and essays in the magazines El Malpensante, Letras Libres and Hermano Cerdo. He is a blogger (Prize for the Best Blog Disseminating Culture in Spanish, Cervantes Institute).
Carlos Fonseca was born in San José, Costa Rica, in 1987 to a Costa Rican father and Puerto Rican mother. When he was seven, his family moved to Puerto Rico, where he went to school. He later studied Comparative Literature at Stanford University and obtained a doctorate in Latin American Literature from Princeton University. In 2015 Anagrama published his first novel, Coronel Lágrimas, later published in English as Colonel Lágrimas by Restless Books, translated by Megan McDowell. In 2017 Anagrama published his second novel, Museo animal, which is forthcoming in English by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in London and teaches Latin American Literature at Cambridge University.
Damián González Bertolino is a Uruguayan writer. His short story collection El increíble Springer won the sixteenth Narradores de la Banda Oriental Fiction Prize. He has also published the novels El fondo (Estuario, Montevideo, 2013) and Los trabajos del amor (Estuario, Montevideo, 2015). His latest novel, Herodes, was published in 2017. 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, Uruguay, where he teaches literature at secondary-school level.
Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón is a Puerto Rican novelist, columnist and translator. He is the author of the novels Palacio (Libros AC, San Juan) and Dicen que los dormidos (ICP, San Juan), which will also be published in Turkish in 2018. Dicen que los dormidos won the Puerto Rico Cultural Institute’s National Novel Prize and was published by the institute in 2014. In 2015, he was awarded the New Voices Prize for promising Puerto Rican authors at the Festival de la Palabra. In 2016, the New York magazine Brooklyn Rail published a translation of one of his stories as part of a selection of contemporary Puerto Rican literature. His stories and essays have appeared in various magazines and anthologies in Puerto Rico and further afield. He lives in Ohio, USA.
Gabriela Jauregui was born in Mexico City. She is the author of the poetry collection Controlled Decay (Black Goat Press/Akashic Books, 2008), the short-story collection La memoria de las cosas (Sexto Piso, 2015), Leash Seeks Lost Bitch (Song Cave, 2016) in collaboration with visual artists Allison Katz and Camilla Wills, and ManyFiestas (Gato Negro, 2017), as well as co-author of Taller de Taquimecanografía (Tumbona, 2011). She has a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California and master’s degrees from the University of California, Riverside and the University of California, Irvine. Her texts and translations have been published in anthologies, museum catalogues and magazines in Mexico, Canada, the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. She is a co-founder of and editor at sur+ ediciones publishing collective and lives in Mexico City.
Laia Jufresa grew up in the cloud forest of Veracruz and spent her teenage years in Paris. Aged eighteen she moved to Mexico City, where she realized she did not know how to cross the street. Since then she has been writing fiction. She is the author of the short story collection El esquinista (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, 2014) and the novel Umami (Literatura Random House, 2015; Oneworld, 2016). Umami has been translated into numerous languages, including English. It was recognized as the best novel in Spanish at the First Novel Festival in Chambery, France; it won the PEN Translates Award and was shortlisted for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. She was selected as one of twenty outstanding Mexican authors under forty (México20 project). She lives in Edinburgh.
Mauro Libertella is an Argentine writer who has published three novels. In Mi libro enterrado (Mansalva, 2013), he wrote about the death of his father and their relationship. It has been published in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica and Peru and has been translated into Italian. El invierno con mi generación (Random House, 2015) is a novel about a group of friends – aged between sixteen and twenty-three – in Buenos Aires at the turn of the twenty-first century. El estilo de los otros (University Diego Portales, 2015) is a book of conversations featuring eighteen contemporary Latin American fiction writers. He lives in Buenos Aires.
Brenda Lozano is a writer and editor. She studied Literature in Mexico and the United States. She was been a writer in residence in the United States, Europe and South America and has been included in numerous anthologies. She edits the Chicago literary magazine Make and is part of the New York publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse. Her first novel Todo nada (Tusquets, 2009) will be adapted for cinema. Cuaderno ideal is her second novel (Alfaguara, 2014). In 2015 she was selected by Conaculta, Hay Festival and the British Council as one of the most important writers under forty in her country. She currently lives in Mexico City. Como piensan las piedras (Alfaguara, 2017) is her first short story collection.
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983. Her first novel Los Ingrávidos was published in English as Faces in the Crowd by Coffee House Press in the United States and Granta in the United Kingdom. Her novel The Story of My Teeth was selected by the New York Times as one of the 100 best books of 2015, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction in 2016, and was selected for the 2017 IMPAC Prize. Her work has been published in magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times and the New Yorker, and has been translated into fifteen languages. Her latest novel, Lost Children Archives, written in English, will be published in 2019 by Knopf in the United States. She lives in New York.
Alan Mills is a Guatemalan writer whose poetry has been included in numerous prestigious Spanish-language anthologies over the last ten years and has been translated into German, French, English, Portuguese, Italian and Czech. His more recent work has been creative non-fiction and fiction. His micro-novel Síncopes was published in Mexico and Peru, and later in France. His most recent book is a literary non-fiction work in English about the hacker culture and ancestral strategies of resistance. It is called Hacking Coyote, and was published first as an ebook (mikrotext, 2016) and later as a printed book in Germany (mikrotext, 2017). He has lived in Guatemala City, Paris, Madrid, São Paulo and Buenos Aires. He currently lives in Berlin, working on a doctoral thesis about indigenista science fiction.
Emiliano Monge is a Mexican writer and political scientist. He has published the novels Morirse de memoria (Sexto Piso, 2010), El cielo árido (Penguin Random House, 2012; winner of the twenty-eighth Jaén Novel Prize and the fifth Otras Voces, Otros Ámbitos Prize) and Las tierras arrasadas (Penguin Random House, 2015; winner of the ninth Elena Poniatowska Ibero-American Novel Prize); the short story collections Arrastrar esa sombra (Sexto Piso, 2008; shortlisted for the Antonin Artaud prize) and La superficie más honda (Penguin Random House, 2017), as well as the children’s book Los insectos invisibles (Sexto Piso, 2013). His stories have also appeared in anthologies including Lo desorden (Alfaguara, 2013), México20 (Pushkin Press, 2015) and Sólo cuento VIII (UNAM, 2016). He lives in Mexico City.
Mónica Ojeda is an Ecuadorian writer. She studied Social Communication and Literature before completing a master’s degree in Literary Creation and another in Cultural Theory and Criticism. Her work has featured in the anthology Emergencias. Doce cuentos iberoamericanos (Candaya, 2013) and she was awarded the 2014 Alba Fiction Prize for the novel La desfiguración Silva (Arte y Literatura, 2015) and the third Desembarco National Poetry Prize in 2015 for El ciclo de las piedras (Rastro de la Iguana Ediciones, 2015). She has recently published her second novel, Nefando (Candaya, 2016). She teaches literature at the Universidad Católica de Santiago de Guayaquil, Ecuador, and is currently working on a doctorate focusing on Latin American pornoerotic literature.
Eduardo Plaza (born in La Serena, Chile, in 1982) is a Chilean writer and journalist. His short story collection Hienas was published by Librosdementira in 2016. He was shortlisted for the Paula short-story competition (2014) and the Gabriela Mistral Literary Games, organized by the Municipality of Santiago (2015).
Eduardo Rabasa is a Mexican writer. He studied Political Science at Mexico’s National University (UNAM), writing his thesis on the concept of power in the works of George Orwell. He writes a weekly column for the cultural section of Milenio newspaper and has translated books by authors such as David Hume, George Orwell and Somerset Maugham. He has published short stories, essays, articles, literary criticism and interviews in publications such as Nexos, GQ and Vice. In 2015 he was selected as part of the México20 anthology project, organized by Hay Festival and Conaculta, and in 2016 he was selected for a special edition of Esquire magazine, which published a list of thirty young Mexicans to follow in the field of arts and culture. He lives in Mexico City.
Felipe Restrepo Pombo is a Colombian journalist, writer and editor. He began his career as a reporter for the magazine Cambio under Gabriel García Márquez. In 2016 he published his first novel, Formas de evasión (Seix Barral, 2016), which is set to be translated into English and French. He was editorial coordinator and wrote the prologue for La ira de México (The Sorrows of Mexico, MacLehose Press/Debate, 2016). He has been a guest at Hay festivals in Cartagena, Xalapa, Querétaro and Mexico City. He is currently editor of the Latin American magazine Gatopardo in Mexico City. Since taking up the position in 2014, the magazine has won the National Journalism Prize and has been recognized as the country’s best publication three years in a row.
Juan Manuel Robles is a Peruvian writer who holds a master’s degree in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University. He has published the non-fiction work Lima freak. Vidas insólitas en una ciudad perturbada (Planeta, 2007) and the novel Nuevos juguetes de la guerra fría (Seix Barral, 2015), which was ranked by the newspaper Perú 21 as the best novel of 2015 and was chosen by Spain’s El País as one of ‘twenty-three books for understanding the Americas’. He has published short stories in various anthologies and magazines. In 2008, he was shortlisted for the Cemex-FNPI Prize for the essay ‘Cromwell, el cajero generoso’. In 2017 he published a short story collection and a piece in Un mundo lleno de futuro, a literary non-fiction book edited by Leila Guerriero. He lives in Lima.
Cristian Romero is a Colombian writer who 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. As part of the fellowship he wrote the book Ahora solo queda la ciudad (Hilo de plata Editores), which was published in 2016. He has also published stories in the University of Antioquia magazine.
Juan Pablo Roncone was born in Arica, Chile in 1982, and moved to Santiago at the age of nineteen. In 2007 an unpublished novel of his was awarded the Roberto Bolaño Award for Literary Creation. In 2011 he published the short story collection Hermano ciervo (Editorial Los Libros Que Leo, 2011; Fiordo Editorial, 2012; Marbot Ediciones, 2013; 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 Tel Aviv’s The Short Story Project, as well as in the Traviesa anthology Childless Parents. He lives in Santiago.
Daniel Saldaña París is a Mexican writer. He has published the poetry books Esa pura materia (UACM, 2008) and La máquina autobiográfica (Bonobos, 2012), and the novel En medio de extrañas víctimas (Sexto Piso, 2013; translated into English as Among Strange Victims, Coffee House Press, 2016; upcoming publication in French). He has received fellowships from FONCA’s Young Artists programme, the Foundation for Mexican Literature and the FONCA/Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec Artistic Residencies project (Montreal, Canada). He has been writer in residence at the OMI International Center for the Arts (New York, 2014) and at the MacDowell Colony (New Hampshire, 2016). In 2017 he was the writer in residence at the Banff Centre (Canada). He currently contributes a column to the Mexican edition of Esquire magazine and lives in Montreal, Canada.
Samanta Schweblin was born in 1978 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she studied film, specializing in screenplay writing. Her short story collections El núcleo del disturbio, Pájaros en la boca and Siete casas vacías won the Casa de las Américas, Juan Rulfo and Ribera del Duero Short Fiction prizes. Her first novel, Distancia de rescate (published in English in 2017 as Fever Dream by Oneworld in the UK and Riverhead in the US) won the Tigre Juan and Estado Crítico prizes and was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Her story collection A Mouthful of Birds is forthcoming in 2019 from Oneworld/Riverhead. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and she has been a fellow of several institutions. She has been living in Berlin for the last four years, where she writes and gives literary workshops.
Jesús Miguel Soto is a Venezuelan writer who studied Social Communication and Arts at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He has worked as a university lecturer, proofreader and editor. As a fiction writer he has written the short story collection Perdidos en Frog and the novels La máscara de cuero and Boeuf (Relato a la manera de Cambridge). His awards include the sixty-fourth El Nacional Annual Short Story Competition (Venezuela); first prize in the seventh SACVEN National Story Competition and the twenty-third Juana Santacruz Literary Event (Mexico). Some of his stories have been published in anthologies such as Joven narrativa venezolana II, De qué va el cuento (Antología del relato venezolano 2000–2012) and Crude Words: Contemporary writing from Venezuela. Since 2014 he has been living in Mexico.
Luciana Sousa was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1986. She studied Literature and Journalism and has taken a number of fiction courses with writers such as Alberto Laiseca, Vicente Battista and Juan Diego Incardona. She has worked with media such as Radio Gráfica, Agencia Paco Urondo and Hecho en Buenos Aires, supporting self-managed popular-communication projects. She currently works as a press officer. Luro, published in December 2016 by Editorial Funesiana, is her first novel.
Mariana Torres (Brazil, 1981) is the author of the book El cuerpo secreto (Páginas de Espuma, 2015) and the short film Rascacielos (2009). She has taught creative writing at Escuela de Escritores since its founding in Madrid, in 2003. She is also part of EACWP (European Association of Creative Writing Programmes). Mariana’s work has been anthologized in Segunda parábola de los talentos (Gens Ediciones, 2011) and Sólo Cuento IX (UNAM, 2017). She was recently selected as part of CELA (Connecting Emerging Literary Artists).
Valentín Trujillo was born in Maldonado, Uruguay, in 1979. He studied Film and Journalism and is a qualified teacher of Language and Literature. In 2016 he received the Medal of Honour awarded by Uruguay’s Cámara del Libro for his contributions to journalistic literary criticism. In 2007 he published the short story collection Jaula de costillas, which won the National Fiction Prize, and in 2013 he published Nacional 88 together with his wife, the journalist Elena Risso. In 2016 he won the Onetti Prize in the Fiction category for his novel ¡Cómanse la ropa! (2017). Also in 2017, Ediciones B published his biography of the Uruguayan intellectual Carlos Real de Azúa. He has two children and lives in Montevideo.
Claudia Ulloa Donoso was born in Lima in 1979. She is the author of the short story collections El pez que aprendió a caminar, Séptima Madrugada and Pajarito, and has won the Peruvian short story competitions Terminemos el cuento (1996) and El cuento de las 1,000 palabras (1998). In 2016 she was selected as writer in residence at Villa Sarkia, a residence for translators and writers in Finland. Her stories have appeared in various Peruvian, Colombian, Mexican and Spanish magazines and in anthologies such as Antología de la Novísima Narrativa Breve Hispanoamericana (Unión Latina, 2006), Les bonnes nouvelles de l’Amérique latine and Anthologie de la nouvelle latinoaméricaine contemporaine (Gallimard, 2010). She currently teaches languages in northern Norway.
Diego Zúñiga is a Chilean writer who studied Journalism at the Pontificia Universidad Católica. He has published the novels Camanchaca (published in English by Coffee House Press, 2017) and Racimo, as well as a book about football, Soy de Católica (Lolita Editores, 2014), and the short story collection Niños héroes (Literatura Random House, 2016). He has won various awards for both his journalism and his fiction, including the Roberto Bolaño Prize for Young Writers; a National Council for Culture and the Arts Fellowship for Literary Writing; the Gabriela Mistral Literary Games Prize for Camanchaca; and a 2013 National Council for Culture and the Arts Prize for Best Literary Work, for Racimo. In 2016 he was the writer in residence at the Arts Faculty of the Pontificia Universidad Católica. He lives in Santiago.