Roberto Bolaño Ávalos

Ignacio Lopez-Vicuna (University of Vermont)

Ed. by Ben Bollig, University of Oxford
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 4.1.3: Hispanic Writing and Culture of Central America and the Caribbean.
Vol. editors: Ben Bollig (University of Oxford), Ceire Broderick (University College Cork), Nuala Finnegan (University College Cork), Anna Forné (Gothenburg University), Cara Levey (University College Cork), Lori Oxford (Western Carolina University), Ailsa Peate (University of Westminster)

Dates

Born 28 Apr 1953
Died 15 Jul 2003
Activity 1976-2003

Places

Born in Chile
Active in Mexico; Spain

Activities

Primary

Novelist
Poet

Resources

Bolaño's Works

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Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago de Chile in 1953, the son of León Bolaño, a truck driver and amateur boxer, and Victoria Ávalos, a schoolteacher. As a child, he lived in Viña del Mar and Quilpué, and spent much of his adolescence in Los Ángeles in the south of Chile. In 1968, when he was fifteen years old, Bolaño and his family moved to Mexico City. Bolaño rapidly immersed himself in the urban and cultural life of Mexico City. Among his early literary influences were Carlos Fuentes’s sprawling urban novel,

La región más transparente

[Where the Air Is Clear] (1958) and the writers of the Mexican

onda

movement José Agustín and Gustavo Sainz. By the time he was seventeen he was writing poems and plays (which do not survive), and decided to quit secondary school in order to…

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2997 words

Citation: Lopez-Vicuna, Ignacio. "Roberto Bolaño Ávalos". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 December 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12552, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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