Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Vásquez studied law in Bogotá before abandoning it for literature, then spent over a decade living in Paris and Barcelona, working as a translator and journalist and translating writers including Victor Hugo and E. M. Forster into Spanish.

He returned to Colombia in his thirties to write more directly about its recent history, having concluded that García Márquez's magic had left younger Colombian writers no vocabulary for the drug-war decades they had actually lived through. The Sound of Things Falling traces a chance shooting back through that inherited violence and won the International Dublin Literary Award.

He continues to write and comment on Colombian politics from Bogotá, part of a generation reckoning directly with the Boom's outsized legacy.