Roberto Merino

Since 2014 he has been part of the rock band Ya Se Fueron, in which he is the oldest member and his son Clemente the youngest. Asked what experience he would choose, more with music than with writing, he answered in March 2015: "If I could, yes, but it is an answer that I give at this time. It is the newest enthusiasm. I would love to. Music has the fascination of the confluence, of the collective. Which is totally opposite to the solitude of writing. One ends relaxed, physically very well. And writing is horrendous. One ends up tense, with his back complete shit. It is totally unnatural from the physical point of view."

His decision to become a writer was made as a teenager, "at 16". "It was an explicit decision. I thought that I could only do that and I was already living as a writer; I already thought as a writer. There were not even hesitations, despite family apprehensions about my economic future, which were completely reasonable," Merino confessed in 2014.

"I have no talent or patience for that," says Merino, explaining why he does not write fiction. As for poetry, he confessed in December 2013: "I have not written poetry in a long time. I have not felt the need. I have not had the chance. I lead an accelerated life that increasingly leaves me less distance to look at the world."

He has worked at the magazines APSI, Don Balón (where he wrote sports chronicles), Fibra, Paula [es] , and Hoy [es] . He has been the editor of Patagonia, the newspaper El Metropolitano [es] , and chronicler of Las Últimas Noticias and El Mercurio. He founded Ediciones Carlos Porter, which published, among others, Claudio Bertoni [es] . He compiled the Antología del humor literario chileno (2002, Sudamericana), and edited the complete columns and chronicles of Joaquín Edwards Bello. He is a professor of the Faculty of Communication and Literature at Diego Portales University.

The first book published by Merino was Trasmigración, which Enrique Lihn would describe as, "a book of poetry written in anti-prosaic prose." Ten years later his second book of poems, Melancolía artificial, came out, but between these, from the beginning of the 1990s, he was reborn as a chronicler, a genre he practiced for the first time at age 13, in 1974.

In 1981, Rodrigo Lira [es] came up with the idea of forming Chamico, and one of its members was Merino, who defined it as "a literary shock group, quite Patagonian and inorganic," "a parody of Surrealist Mandragora." "In the end, it was just a joke that lasted a few months." Merino explains that "the chamico is a toxic weed which makes the cows sick, and also it was likened to marijuana of bad quality." Floating members of the group were Antonio de la Fuente, Perico Cordovez, Alejandro Perez, Juan Pedro Broussein, Lira, and Merino.

Roberto Merino entered Chilean literature at the end of the 1980s as a poet, but his fame is mainly due to his chronicles.

Roberto Felipe Merino Rojo (born 14 November 1961) is a Chilean writer and journalist.