![]() “Although I also know,” he continued in his acceptance speech, One time he answered, “I’m Latin American.” Other times he would say that the Spanish language was his country. ![]() Bolaño was routinely asked in interviews whether he considered himself Chilean, having been born in Santiago in 1953, or Spanish, having lived in Spain the last two decades of his life, until his death in 2003, or Mexican, having lived in Mexico City for ten years in between. Bolaño won the prize for The Savage Detectives, his sprawling, exuberant account of two Latin American poets over twenty-some years, which made him a literary celebrity and established him as one of the most talented and inventive novelists writing in Spanish. ![]() That sounds pretty demagogic, but I completely agree with him….” That is from Roberto Bolaño’s acceptance speech for the 1999 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, an award given by the government of Venezuela for the best Spanish-language novel of the year in Latin America or Spain. “A writer’s patria or country, as someone said, is his language. ![]()
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