The Modern Novel

Biography

Héctor Abad Faciolince was born in Medellín in 1958. His father was a doctor and human rights leader who was assassinated in 1987. Abad Faciolince’s book El olvido que seremos (Oblivion) is about his father. Abad Faciolince was one of six children, the others all being girls. At school, he edited a magazine and wrote for it. After school, he did not go immediately to university but accompanied his father to Mexico. Back in Medellín, he attended the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana but was expelled for a column he wrote in a magazine critical of the Pope.

He next went to the University of Antioquia but soon left to accompany his girlfriend to Italy, where he studied Modern Language and Literature at the University of Turin with a thesis on Guillermo Cabrera Infante‘s Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Trapped Tigers).

He returned home in 1987 but his father was shot in that year and he was threatened, so he immediately returned to Europe, spending the next five years in Italy, teaching Spanish at the University of Verona. He also translated various Italian works into Spanish.

He returned to Colombia in 1992, where he has published many well-received novels, stories and essays, as well as writing numerous articles for the press. Three of his works have been translated into English.

Other links

Héctor Abad Faciolince
Héctor Abad Faciolince
Héctor Abad Faciolince
Fatherland: On Héctor Abad Faciolince (by Jorge Volpi)
Interview
His homepage (in Spanish)
Héctor Abad Faciolince (in Spanish)
Interview (in Spanish)
Interview (in Spanish)
Interview (in Spanish)