Introduction
Alejandro Andrés Zambra Infantas (Santiago, Chile, 1975) is a Chilean poet, short story writer and novelist.
Early life
Alejandro Zambra was born in 1975 in Villa Portales, a district of Santiago, Chile, to Horacio Zambra and Rosa Infantas. At age five, his family moved to the village of Las Terrazas in Maipú.
Zambra studied at the Instituto Nacional General José Miguel Carrera and the University of Chile, from which he graduated in 1997 with a degree in Hispanic literature. He won a scholarship to pursue postgraduate studies in Madrid, where he obtained an MA in Hispanic studies. Back in Chile, he received a PhD in literature from the Pontifical Catholic University.
Career
Zambra teaches at the School of Literature at Diego Portales University in Santiago.
Zambra's first novel, Bonsái, was awarded the Chilean Critics Award for best novel of the year in 2006 and attracted much attention in Chile. As the highly influential Santiago newspaper El Mercurio summed up, "The publication of Bonsai ... marked a kind of bloodletting in Chilean literature. It was said (or argued) that it represented the end of an era, or the beginning of another, in the nation's letters." In 2011 the book was turned into a film of the same name.
Short stories and articles by Zambra have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Vice, Zoetrope, The Virginia Quarterly Review and Rattapallax.