Bolaño was born in Santiago, the son of a truck driver (who was also a boxer) and a teacher. He and his sister spent their early years in southern and coastal Chile. By his own account he was a skinny, nearsighted, bookish, and unpromising child. He was dyslexic and was often bullied at school, where he felt an outsider.

In 1968 he moved with his family to Mexico City, dropped out of school, worked as a journalist, and became active in left-wing political causes.

A key episode in Bolaño's life, mentioned in different forms in several of his works, occurred in 1973, when he left Mexico for Chile to "help build the revolution" by supporting the socialist regime of Salvador Allende. After Augusto Pinochet's coup against Allende, Bolaño was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist and spent eight days in custody. He was rescued by two former classmates who had become prison guards. Bolaño describes his experience in the story "Dance Card." According to the version of events he provides in this story, he was neither tortured nor killed, as he had expected, but "in the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas. . . . I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles." The episode is also recounted, from the point of view of Bolaño's former classmates, in the story "Detectives."

For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France, and Spain.

In the 1970s, Bolaño became a Trotskyist and a founding member of infrarrealismo, a minor poetic movement. He affectionately parodied aspects of the movement in The Savage Detectives.

After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, he returned to Mexico, living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible, "a professional provocateur feared at all the publishing houses even though he was a nobody, bursting into literary presentations and readings," his editor, Jorge Herralde, recalled. His erratic behavior had as much to do with his leftist ideology as with his chaotic lifestyle.

Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, campground custodian, bellhop, and garbage collector. He worked by day and wrote at night. From the early 1980s he lived in the small Catalan beach town of Blanes.

He continued with poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño said that he began writing fiction because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction." However, he continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a collection of his verse, spanning 20 years, was published in 2000 under the title The Romantic Dogs.

Bolaño had conflicted feelings about his native country, which he visited just once after going into voluntary exile. He was notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment. "He didn't fit into Chile, and the rejection that he experienced left him free to say whatever he wanted, which can be a good thing for a writer," commented Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman.

Bolaño's death in 2003 came after a long period of declining health. It has been suggested in the English media that he was at one time a heroin addict and that the cause of his death was a liver illness resulting from Hepatitis C, with which he was infected as a result of sharing needles during his "mainlining" days. However, the accuracy of this has been called into question given the emphatic denials from Bolaño's wife and from his close friend Enrique Vila-Matas. It is true, however, that he suffered from liver failure and was near the top of a transplant list at the time of his death.

Six weeks before he died, Bolaño's fellow Latin American novelists hailed him as the most important figure of his generation at an international conference he attended in Seville. Among his closest friends were the novelists Rodrigo Fresán and Enrique Vila-Matas; Fresán's tribute included the statement that "Roberto emerged as a writer at a time when Latin America no longer believed in utopias, when paradise had become hell, and that sense of monstrousness and waking nightmares and constant flight from something horrid permeates 2666 and all his work." "His books are political," Fresán also observed, "but in a way that is more personal than militant or demagogic, that is closer to the mystique of the beatniks than the Boom." In Fresán's view he "was one of a kind, a writer who worked without a net, who went all out, with no brakes, and in doing so, created a new way to be a great Latin American writer." Wrote Larry Rohter of the New York Times, "Bolaño joked about the 'posthumous', saying the word 'sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, one who is undefeated,' and he would no doubt be amused to see how his stock has risen now that he is dead."

Bolaño was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland." (In his last interview, published by the Mexican edition of Playboy magazine, Bolaño said he regarded himself as a Latin American, adding that "my only country is my two children and perhaps, though in second place, some moments, streets, faces or books that are in me....") Bolaño named his son Lautaro, after the Mapuche leader Lautaro, who resisted the Spanish conquest of Chile, as related in the sixteenth-century epic La araucana. His other child, a daughter, was named Alexandra.

Although deep down he always felt like a poet, in the vein of his beloved Nicanor Parra, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections. Although Bolaño espoused the lifestyle of a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible for all his adult life, he only began to produce substantial works of fiction in the 1990s. He almost immediately became a highly regarded figure in Spanish and Latin American letters.

In rapid succession, he published a series of critically acclaimed works, the most important of which are the novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile (By Night In Chile), and, posthumously, the novel 2666. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes. In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers.

Translation of his works into English

The first of his works to appear in English was By Night In Chile, translated by Chris Andrews, which was published by New Directions in 2003. His prose work since has largely been in the hands of Chris Andrews as well as Natasha Wimmer. Andrews translated the first four releases of Bolaño's work in English and is greatly responsible for bringing Bolaño's work to the attention of English-reading audiences. Wimmer's translations of "The Savage Detectives" in 2007 and "2666" in 2008...published in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux--brought Bolaño his widest recognition among English readers. Both of these were published after Bolaño died in 2003. Since these works have garnered a large measure of critical praise almost the entirety of Bolaño's works in Spanish have been slated by New Directions to be translated and published with either Andrews or Wimmer penning the translations.

A collection of his poetry, entitled The Romantic Dogs, was published in 2008 by New Directions in a translation by Laura Healy.

(See "External Links" at the bottom of the page for a link to more English translations)

By Night in Chile

By Night In Chile is a narrative constructed as the loose, uneditorialised deathbed rantings of a Chilean Jesuit priest and failed poet, Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix. At a crucial point in his career, Father Urrutia is approached by two agents of Opus Dei, who inform him that he has been chosen to visit Europe to study the preservation of old churches - the perfect job for a cleric with artistic sensitivities.

On his arrival, he is told that the major threat to European cathedrals is pigeon droppings, and that his Old World counterparts have devised a clever solution to the problem. They have become falconers, and in town after town he watches as the priests' hawks viciously dispatch flocks of harmless birds. Chillingly, the Jesuit's failure to protest against this bloody means of architectural preservation signals to his employers that he will serve as a passive accomplice to the predatory and brutal methods of the Pinochet regime. This is the beginning of Bolano's indictment of "l'homme intellectuel" who retreats into art, using aestheticism as a cloak and shield while the world lies around him, nauseatingly unchanged, perennially unjust and cruel.

Amulet

Amulet focuses on the Uruguayan poet Auxilio Lacouture, who also appears in The Savage Detectives as a minor character trapped in a bathroom at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City for two weeks while the army storms the school. In this short novel, she runs across a host of Latin American artists and writers, among them Arturo Belano, Bolaño's alter ego. Unlike The Savage Detectives, Amulet stays in Auxilio's first-person voice, while still allowing for the frenetic scattering of personalities Bolaño is so famous for.

Distant Star

Distant Star is a bizarre novella nested in the politics of the Pinochet regime, concerned with murder, photography and even poetry blazed across the sky by the smoke of air force planes. This dark satirical work deals with the history of Chilean politics in a morbid and sometimes humorous fashion.

Nazi Literature in the Americas

Nazi Literature in the Americas

The Savage Detectives

The Savage Detectives has been compared by Jorge Edwards to Julio Cortázar's Rayuela and José Lezama Lima's Paradiso.

In a review in El País, the Spanish critic Ignacio Echevarría declared it "the novel that Borges would have written." (An avid reader, Bolaño often expressed his love for Borges and Cortázar's work, and once concluded an overview of contemporary Argentinian literature by saying that "one should read Borges more.") "Bolano's genius is not just the extraordinary quality of his writing, but also that he does not conform to the paradigm of the Latin American writer", said Ignacio Echeverria, former literary editor of El País, Spain's leading daily. "His writing is neither magical realism, nor baroque nor localist, but an imaginary, extraterritorial mirror of Latin America, more as a kind of state of mind than a specific place."

The central section of The Savage Detectives presents a long, fragmentary series of reports about the trips and adventures of Arturo Belano—an alliteratively named alter-ego, who also appears in other stories & novels—and Ulises Lima between 1976-1996. These trips and adventures take them from Mexico DF to several places in Europe, to Israel and even Liberia during the civil war in the mid-nineties. The reports are sandwiched at the beginning and end of the novel by the story of their quest of Cesárea Tinajero, the founder of "real visceralismo", a Mexican avant-garde literary movement of the twenties.

The aspiring 17-year-old poet García Madero tells us first about the poetic and social scene around the new "visceral realists." He later closes the novel with his account of their escape from Mexico City to the state of Sonora. Bolaño called The Savage Detectives "a love letter to my generation."

2666

The novel 2666 was published in 2004. Allegedly a first draft submitted to his publisher prior to his death, the text of 2666 was the major preoccupation of the last five years of his life. The book was published posthumously in Spanish in 2004 to tremendous acclaim, after what appears to have been a bit of dithering over Bolaño's final intentions ... a small result of which is that its English translation (by Natasha Wimmer) has been bracketed by two faintly defensive statements justifying the book's present form.

At more than 1,100 pages (898 pages in the English-language edition), the novel is divided in five "parts", four and a half of which were finished before Bolaño's death. Focused on the unsolved and still ongoing serial murder of Ciudad Juárez (Santa Teresa in the novel), the apocalyptic 2666 depicts the horror of the 20th century through a wide cast of characters, including the secretive, Pynchon-like German writer Archimboldi - whom four literary critics are engaged on a quest to find.

In 2008 the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The award was accepted by Natasha Wimmer, the book's translator.

In March, 2009, The Guardian newspaper reported that an additional Part 6 of 2666 was among papers found by researchers going through Bolaño's literary estate.

Last Evenings on Earth

Last Evenings on Earth is a collection of fourteen short stories narrated by a host of different voices primarily in the first person. A number are narrated by an author, "B.", who is - in a move typical of the author - a stand-in for the author himself.

The Romantic Dogs

Bolaño has stated that he considered himself first and foremost a poet and took up fiction writing primarily later in life in order to support his children. The Romantic Dogs is his first collection of poetry to be translated into English, appearing in a bilingual edition in 2008 under New Directions and translated by Laura Healy.

The Skating Rink

Set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink is told by three male narrators, revolving around a beautiful figure-skating champion, Nuria Martí. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a pompous but besotted civil servant secretly builds a skating rink in a local ruin of a mansion, using public funds. But Nuria has affairs, provokes jealousy, and the skating rink becomes a crime scene.

Antwerp

Considered by his literary executor Ignacio Echevarría to be the big bang of the Bolaño universe, the loose prose-poem novel was written in 1980 when Bolaño was 27. The book remained unpublished until 2002, when it was published in Spanish as "Amberes," a year before the author's death. "Antwerp" contains a loose narrative structured less around a story arc and more around motifs, reappearing characters and anecdotes...many of which went on to become common material for Bolaño: crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits. The back of the first New Directions edition of book contains a quote from Bolaño about "Antwerp": "The only novel that doesn't make me blush."

New Directions has scheduled a number of Bolaño's works for release in English translations including: Between Parentheses (June 2011) and The Secret of Evil (November 2011).

In the final decade of his life Bolaño produced a significant body of work, consisting of short stories and novels. In his fiction the characters are often novelists or poets, some of them aspiring and others famous, and writers appear ubiquitous in Bolaño's world, variously cast as heroes, villains, detectives and iconoclasts.

Other significant themes of his work include quests, "the myth of poetry", the "interrelationship of poetry and crime", the inescapable violence of modern life in Latin America, and the essential human business of youth, love and death.

In one of his stories, "Dentist", Bolaño appears to set out his basic aesthetic principles. The narrator pays a visit to an old friend, a dentist. The friend introduces him to a poor Indian boy who turns out to be a literary genius. At one point during a long evening of inebriated conversation, the dentist expressed what he believes to be the essence of art:

"That's what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It's the only thing that really is particular and personal. It's the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular. And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home. But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story.... The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every damn thing matters! It's just that we don't realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don't even realize that's a lie."

Like large parts of Bolaño's work, this conception of fiction manages to be at once elusive and powerfully suggestive. As Jonathan Lethem has commented, "Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world."

Bolaño's writings repeatedly manifest a concern with the nature and purpose of literature and its relationship to the life. One recent assessment of his works discusses his idea of literary culture as a "whore".

Among the many acid pleasures of the work of Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003, is his idea that culture, in particular literary culture, is a whore. In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolaño, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor. In his novel "The Savage Detectives," two avid young Latino poets never lose faith in their rarefied art no matter the vicissitudes of life, age and politics. If they are sometimes ridiculous, they are always heroic. But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella "By Night in Chile," that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it's a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño's genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?

Stacy D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review, February 24, 2008 [1]

Fiction

• Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (1984) ["Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic"]
• La pista de hielo (1993) (novel): A crime story in a Spanish Mediterranean town. The choral narrative techniques Bolaño will profusely use writing Los detectives salvajes are already at work here. One of the three narrators, Gaspar Heredia, is very similar to Bolaño's literary alter ego, Arturo Belano.
• Literatura nazi en América "Nazi Literature in the Americas" (1996) (novel): An encyclopedia of fictional authors inspired by the works of Borges and J.R. Wilcock.
• Estrella distante (Distant Star) (1996) (novella): An expansion of the last chapter of Literatura nazi.
• Llamadas telefónicas (1997) (short stories) ["Telephone Calls"]
• Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives) (1998) (novel)
• Amuleto (Amulet) (1999) (novella): Again, Bolaño decides to take a secondary character from a previous novel and expand her story. This time, the character is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan poet "lost" in Mexico who appeared in Los detectives salvajes.
• Monsieur Pain (1999) (novel) ["Mister Bread"]
• Nocturno de Chile (By Night in Chile) (2000) (novella): The last night of an Opus Dei priest and literary critic connected to the dictatorial government of Pinochet in Chile.
• Putas asesinas (2001) (short stories) ["Killer Whores"]
• Amberes (2002) (novella): Strongly fragmented book which was considered by Bolaño the foundation for everything he would write afterwards. Although not published until 2002, it was written around 1983.
• El gaucho insufrible (2003) (short stories) ["The Insufferable Gaucho"]
• 2666 (2004) (novel)
• Last Evenings on Earth (2006) (short stories): A selection of stories taken from Putas asesinas and Llamadas telefónicas, translated into English by Chris Andrews.
• Amulet (2006): Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, published by New Directions.
• El secreto del mal (March 2007) (short stories): A collection of short stories from his personal archive edited by Ignacio Echevarría.
• The Skating Rink (August 2009) (novel): A quasi-crime novel told by three male narrators and revolving around a beautiful figure-skating champion. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews.
• Monsieur Pain (January 2010) (novel): Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, published by New Directions.
• Antwerp (April 2010) (novel): Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, published by New Directions.
• The Return (June 2010) (stories): Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, published by New Directions.
• The Insufferable Gaucho (August 2010) (stories): Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, published by New Directions.
• Between Parentheses (June 2011) (essays): Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, published by New Directions.
• The Secret of Evil (November 2011) (posthumous collection): Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, published by New Directions.
• El Tercer Reich (2010, written in 1989) (novel) (posthumous) ["The Third Reich"]

Poetry

• Los perros románticos: Poemas 1980-1998 (2000) [published in English as The Romantic Dogs by New Directions]
• Tres (2000) [Three]
• La universidad desconocida [The Unknown University] (2007)

Non-fiction

• El gaucho insufrible (2003), see above, also contains two essays.
• Entre paréntesis (2004), a collection of articles, columns, interviews and speeches, edited by Ignacio Echevarría.