Last Evenings On Earth

The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking worldBolaño’s language, alert and always graceful, his way of constructing narratives that are simultaneously disconcerting, brilliant and infinitely immediate, is a form of resisting evil, adversity and mediocrity * Le Monde *‘Roberto Bolaño’s oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century.’ – Lauren Groff‘Roberto Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia … and his writing was always unparalleled.’ – Mariana Enríquez‘Roberto Bolaño’s fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental.’ * Times Literary Supplement *Roberto Bolaño mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into the sublime, the everyday into adventure. Bolaño is among the best at this diabolical skill – Georgi GospodinovFor stunning wit, brutal honesty, loving humanity and a heart that bleeds into the simplest of words, no other writer ever came close – Marlon JamesIt’s no exaggeration to call Bolaño a genius. * Washington Post *

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by the New York Times as ‘the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation’, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, and 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Bolano died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition.

Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He teaches in the department of French, Italian and Spanish Studies of the University of Melbourne. His translation of Roberto Bolano’s Distant Star in 2005 won the prestigious Valle-Inclán Prize.