Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño Ávalos (Spanish: [roˈβerto βoˈlaɲo ˈaβalos]; 28 April 1953 – 15 July 2003) was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes as a "work so rich and dazzling that it will surely draw readers and scholars for ages". The New York Times described him as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation". 2Life 3Childhood in Chile Bolaño was born in 1953 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 skinny, nearsighted, and bookish: an unpromising child. He was dyslexic and was often bullied at school, where he felt an outsider. He came from a lower-middle-class family, and while his mother was a fan of best-sellers they were not an intellectual family. He had one younger sister. He was ten when he started his first job, selling bus tickets on the Quilpué-Valparaiso rout