Santiago Roncagliolo

In 2014, Roncagliolo published La Pena Máxima, a new adventure of fiscal Felix Chacaltana, star of Red April, set in the 1978 World Cup during the Argentinian dictatorship. That year, The Wall Street Journal named him one of six authors following in the footsteps of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

In English, he has also published a collection of black humour short stories: Hi, this is Conchita (2013), as most of his work, is translated by Edith Grossman, who has worked with the best Hispanic authors from Cervantes to Gabriel García Márquez.

The Uruguayan lover (2012) is the story of writer Enrique Amorim: millionaire but communist, homosexual but married, Uruguayan but Argentinian, he was a fascinating impostor who shared secrets with the best artists of 20th century: Pablo Neruda, Charles Chaplin or Pablo Picasso. He was in love with Federico García Lorca and even hinted that he had buried the remains of the Granada poet. The Uruguayan lover culminates with La Cuarta Espada and Memorias de una dama, a trilogy of true stories about Latin American twentieth century.

In 2010 he was chosen by the British magazine Granta as one of 22 best writers in Spanish under 35 years.

His non-fiction book Memorias de una Dama (2009) recalls his life as a ghost writer for the daughter of a powerful Dominican family with roots in fascism, mafia and Caribbean dictatorships. But the family censored the book. It was retired from shelves and, still now, his author is forbidden to talk about it.

In 2006 his novel Red April won the Alfaguara Prize novel. In English, that novel received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It is translated to more than 20 languages.

Roncagliolo dreamed of becoming a writer. In Lima, reached to publish books for children and a play while working in the Human Rights Commission, until in 2000, he flew to Madrid determined to succeed. He served as a ghostwriter and got the legal residence with a contract for house cleaning. Says the author: "I went to Spain to be a writer, in the wake of the Latin Americans who had triumphed in Europe, such as García Márquez, Vargas Llosa or Jose Donoso. I soon realized losers far outnumber the winners, but no one knows their stories. In honor of all those martyrs of literature, I decided to write the story of a loser". In the end, Roncagliolo actually became a writer in Spain. He currently resides in Barcelona.

Santiago Rafael Roncagliolo Lohmann (born March 29, 1975) is a Peruvian writer, screenwriter, translator and journalist. He has written five novels about fear. He is also author of a trilogy of non-fiction books on Latin American twentieth century.