Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, won the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize, and Natasha Wimmers translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bolano died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Described by the New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666. Natasha Wimmer is an American translator who is best known for her translations of Roberto Bolanos works from Spanish to English. She grew up in Iowa and also spent a few years as a child in Madrid. Wimmer attended Harvard University and studied Spanish literature. After college she began to work for Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, as an assistant and later as a managing editor, where she happened upon Bolanos Savage Detectives. Bolanos translator was too busy at the time to work on this project and Wimmer was thrilled to take it on herself. Her translation was incredibly well-received. She has since gone on to translate several of Bolanos works as well as the work of Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2007 she received an NEA Translation Grant, in 2009 she won the PEN Translation Prize, and she has also received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her translation of Bolanos 2666 also won the National Book Awards Best Novel of the Year. She is a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and teaches translation seminars at Princeton University. She lives in New York City. Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He studied at the University of Melbourne and taught there, in the French program, from 1995 to 2008. He is now teaching at the University of Western Sydney, where he is a member of the Writing and Society Research Center. As well as translating books by Roberto Bolano and Cesar Aira for New Directions, he has published a critical study (Poetry and Cosmogony: Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge, Rodopi, 1999) and a collection of poems (Cut Lunch, Indigo, 2002).
