Santiago Roncagliolo: Memoirs of a Peruvian lover
– Peru
Santiago Rafael Roncagliolo Lohmann (* 1975 in Lima) is a Peruvian writer, screenwriter, translator, and journalist. In 2010, he was selected by the British magazine Granta as one of the 22 best Spanish writers under 35.
He has written five novels about fear. He has published a trilogy of non-fiction books about Latin America in the 20th century. He spent part of his childhood in Mexico, where his family was exiled. It was in the Mexican exile that Roncagliolo struggled with fear, which is the underlying theme of all his novels. He elaborated on this experience in the award-winning novel Abril rojo (Red April, 2007), which has been translated into more than twenty languages. El amante uruguayo: una historia real (The Uruguayan Lover, 2013) is the story of writer Enrique Amorim: a millionaire but a communist, a homosexual but married, an Uruguayan but an Argentinian, a fascinating con artist who shared secrets with the greatest artists of the 20th century: Pablo Neruda, Charlie Chaplin and Pablo Picasso. He was in love with Federico García Lorca and is said to have buried his remains. The Uruguayan Lover together with La Cuarta Espada (The Fourth Sword, 2000) and Memorias de una dama (2009, Memoirs of a Lady) form a trilogy of true stories from the 20th century in Latin America.
Roncagliolo is also a screenwriter, investigative journalist and political advisor. He has collaborated with the Spanish newspaper El País and several Latin American periodicals. He has translated the works of many authors, including Jean Genet, Joyce Carol Oates and André Gide. His novel Pudor (Modesty, 2005) was made into a film.