Daniel Alarcón

Daniel Alarcón
Daniel Alarcón, June 6, 2010
Born	1977 Lima, Peru
Occupation	Writer, Journalist
Nationality	Peru, United States
Website
danielalarcon.com

Daniel Alarcón (born 1977 in Lima, Peru) is 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 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.

Biography

Alarcón, a native of Peru, was raised, from the age of 3, in Birmingham, Alabama, and is an alumnus of Indian Springs School. As a high schooler, he attended the Telluride Association Summer Program. 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. 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

Books

• War by Candlelight: Stories. Harper. 2005. ISBN 978-0-06059-478-7.
  • Translated to Spanish by Rayo: Guerra en la Penumbra in 2005 and by Alfaguara: Guerra à la Luz de las Velas 2006
• Lost City Radio. Harper. 2007. ISBN 978-0-06059-479-4.
  • Translated to Spanish: Radio Ciudad Perdida, Alfaguara, 2007.
• At Night We Walk in Circles. Riverhead Books. 2013. ISBN 978-1-59463-171-9.

Spanish language books

• 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

Short stories

• "City of Clowns". The New Yorker. June 16, 2003.
• "Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979". Virginia Quarterly Review. 80 (3). Summer 2004.
• "The King Is Always Above the People". Granta (97: Best of Young American Novelists 2). Spring 2007. (Subscription Required)
• "The Bridge". Granta. 103 (Autumn): 181–212. 2008.
• "The Provincials". Granta. 118 (Winter). 2012.
• "The Composer". Virginia Quarterly Review. 88 (1). Winter 2012.

Articles and criticism

• "What kind of Latino am I?". Salon. May 24, 2005.
• "Let's go, country: The new Latin left comes to Peru". Harper's. September 2006.
• "Lost in Translation". Granta. January 23, 2009.
• "The Inauguration". Granta. January 27, 2009.
• "Life Among the Pirates". Granta (109: Work). Winter 2009.
• "The Ground Floor". Granta (117: Horror). Autumn 2011. (Subscription Required)

Anthologies

• Zoetrope All Story: The Latin American Issue. A compilation of stories by Latin American writers. Co-edited with Diego Trelles Paz. Spring 2009
• The Secret Miracle: The Novelist's Handbook. St. Martin's Griffin. 2010. ISBN 978-0-80508-714-7. (Edited by Alarcón)

Adaptations

• Payasos (2009) - Peruvian short film adapting Alarcón's story "City of Clowns"
• City of Clowns. Illustrated by Sheila Alvarado. Riverhead Books. 2015. ISBN 978-1-59463-333-1.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) (Graphic novel adaptation of short story)

Awards

• Recipient of a Whiting 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.

External links

• Daniel Alarcón website
• Profile at The Whiting Foundation