Daniel Alarcon
Daniel Alarcon
Daniel Alarcónis a Peruvian-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. 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...
NationalityPeruvian
ProfessionAuthor
CountryPeru
I love to walk through the streets of Jesus Maria and Pueblo Libre. The Spanish colonial buildings are in bright colors, two stories high, with these intricate wooden, windowed balconies.
I think probably the thing I'm worst at is the most ephemeral stuff, like blogs. I find it really hard to write. And I'm often been asked to write columns for papers in Peru. And I can't. I would die. There's no way I could write a column.
It's true that there are people who live the idea of being an artist, as opposed to the idea of making art,
Ask any human being alive if they're the same person they were seven years ago and they're going to tell you they aren't.
I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.
Publication in 'The New Yorker' meant everything, and it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life.
I began visiting Lima's prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, 'Lost City Radio,' was published in Peru.
I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.
How emigration is actually lived - well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival.
Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller, whose gifts are displayed on every page of this beautiful, daring, and deeply humane book.
I guess in my own life I don't really think much about manliness too much. I feel like a lot of men that I know don't sit around thinking, "How am I supposed to be a man?" I don't think that I have to prove anything.
Radio is the medium that most closely approximates the experience of reading. As a novelist, I find it very exciting to be able to reach people who might not ever pick up one of my books, either because they can't afford it (as is often the case in Latin America), or because they just don't have the habit of reading novels.
I'm a believer in the benefits of translation. It's a necessity and a privilege - it would be awful to be limited to reading authors who's work was composed in the languages I happen to have learned.
Meaning can be usually be approximated, but often by sacrificing style. When I review my translations into Spanish, that's what I'm most concerned with, reading the sentences aloud in Spanish to make sure they sound the way I want them to. To be honest, I much prefer being translated into Greek or Japanese; in those cases, you have no way of being involved, and no pressure.