Daniel Alarcón

Daniel Alarcón (born 1977 in Lima, Peru) is an American author who lives in San Francisco, California; he has been a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College and a Visiting Writer at California College of the Arts. In Spring 2013, he was a Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program.^[1] Daniel Alarcón’s work has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere, and anthologized in Best American Non-Required Reading 2004 and 2005. He is Associate Editor of the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra, and he edited a portfolio for the magazine A Public Space on the writing of Peru in 2007. He is a former Fulbright Scholar to Peru, and a 2011 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. His novel At Night We Walk in Circles was published by Riverhead Books in October 2013. An avid soccer player, Alarcon is renowned for diving with the slightest touch.

Biography

Alarcón, a native of Peru, was raised, from the age of 3, in Birmingham, Alabama, U.S., and is an alumnus of Indian Springs School. He earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Columbia University and a master's from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has studied in Ghana and taught in New York City.

His first book, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. In 2008, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, named a "Best Young American Novelist" by Granta magazine, and one of 39 under 39 Latin American Novelists.^[2] In 2010, he was also recognized by the New Yorker as one of 20 promising writers under 40.

Alarcón's debut novel, Lost City Radio, was published 2007, and has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, Greek, and is forthcoming in Italian, Serbian, Turkish, and Japanese. The German translation of Lost City Radio by Friedericke Meltendorf received the International Literature Award from the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. In 2009, he published a collection of short stories, El rey está siempre por encima del pueblo (The king is always above the people), and the following year, "Ciudad de payasos", a graphic novel adapted from his 2003 story City of Clowns, with illustrations by Peruvian artist Sheila Alvarado.

In 2011, with partners Carolina Guerrero, Martina Castro and Annie Correal, he founded Radio Ambulante, a Spanish language podcast telling Latin American stories.

Bibliography

• War by Candlelight: Stories (2005) ISBN 0-06-059478-0 (hdbk), ISBN 0-06-059480-2 (pbbk). Translated to Spanish by Rayo: Guerra en la Penumbra in 2005 and by Alfaguara: Guerra à la Luz de las Velas 2006
• "What kind of Latino am I?", Salon.com May 24, 2005
• "Let's Go, Country: The new Latin left comes to Peru" PDF (1.19 MB), Harper's Magazine September 2006
• Lost City Radio (2007) ISBN 0-06-059479-9. Translated to Spanish: Radio Ciudad Perdida, Alfaguara, 2007.
• "The bridge". Granta 103 (Autumn): 181–212. 2008. 
• Zoetrope All Story: The Latin American Issue". A compilation of stories by Latin American writers. Co-edited with Diego Trelles Paz. Spring 2009
• El Rey siempre está por encima del pueblo Editorial Sexto Piso, Mexico City, Mexico, 2009. Published also in Lima Peru by Editorial Seix Barral, Planeta, 2009
• Payasos. Film adaptation of "City of Clowns", a story which first appeared in The New Yorker in 2003. Lima, Peru, 2009.
• City of Clowns. Graphic novel based on the story by the same name. Illustrated by Sheila Alvarado, a Peruvian artist. Lima, Peru, 2011
• At Night We Walk in Circles, Riverhead Books, October 2013.

Awards

• Recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award in 2004 for fiction
• Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship 2007
• One of 21 Young American Novelists Granta, UK, 2007
• One of 39 under 39 Latino American Novelists (Hay Festival, Bogota, Colombia, 2007)
• One of 7 finalists for the Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, Mercantile Library For Fiction, 2007
• Recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2007
• One of 37 under 36 selected by the Smithsonian Magazine (Fall Special Issue, 2007) as Young American Innovators in the Arts and Sciences
• Lost City Radio has made the lists of best fiction for 2007 of the Washington Post, Booklist, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and The Financial Times (London).
• Alabama Library Association Award for Fiction, Birmingham, Alabama, 2008
• 2008 Pen USA award for Lost City Radio, Los Angeles, CA
• 2009 International Literature Award – House of World Cultures (Berlin, Germany)
• The "Idiot President" has been selected for the best short stories and a narrative about describing his traveling in Palestine for the best travel stories. Both in 2009.

References

External links

• 'Life Among the Pirates', Daniel Alarcón's essay on the book piracy trade in Peru, printed in Granta: 'Work', in January 2010.
• Daniel Alarcón website
• Radio Ambulante website
• Daniel Olivas interviews Daniel Alarcón for The Elegant Variation, January 31, 2007.
• Hernandez, Daniel (2007). "Between the Lost and the Found: Daniel Alarcón and his novel of the disappeared", LA Weekly interview with Mr. Alarcon, March 22, 2007.
• Fay, Sarah (2007). "Missing," review of Lost City Radio from the New York Times, March 25, 2007.
• Online interview with author on Letras Latinas Oral History Project.