Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in 1957 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. When he was four, his family moved to his father\u2019s homeland, El Salvador. As a young man, he studied history for six months at York University in Toronto, Ontario, before moving back to El Salvador in 1979. There he worked as a journalist committed to the leftist cause, although he would distance himself from its ideology in 1984. In 1982, he began working as an editor for the Salvadoran news agency, and in 1984 as a correspondent for the Brazilian magazine \u00bbCuadernos del tercer mundo.\u00ab In 1991, Castellanos Moya became one of the founders of the first newspaper to be published in El Salvador after the civil war. But the calm did not last long. His book \u00bbEl asco\u00ab (tr: Revulsion) appeared in 1997. Subtitled \u00bbThomas Bernhard in San Salvador,\u00ab it used the work of the Austrian writer to paint an exaggerated, angry picture of the state of the Central American country, in which nothing is sugarcoated or aggrandized. As a result Castellanos Moya received death threats and was forced to leave El Salvador in a hurry.<\/p>\n
The author made his literary debut nine years before that with the novel \u00bbLa di\u00e1spora\u00ab (tr: Diaspora). It is the story of exiles from El Salvador during the civil war, a fate he shared, living in Mexico City from 1981 to 1991. In 1988, the book was honored with the Premio Nacional de la Novela awarded by the Central American University \u00bbJos\u00e9 Sime\u00f3n Ca\u00f1as.\u00ab His first book to be translated into German was the 2000 novel \u00bbLa diabla en el espejo\u00ab (Eng: \u00bbThe She-Devil in the Mirror\u00ab, 2009). Written as the protagonist\u2019s first-person narrative, Castellanos Moya uses the detective fiction genre for a scathing look at the Salvadoran upper class. In a review for the German trade journal \u00bbLiteraturNachrichten,\u00ab Alexandra Ortiz Wallner praised the fast pace of the story, which however, she wrote, also allows reflection on a single sentence, since the book leaves much to the reader\u2019s imagination. The most recent book to be translated into German was \u00bbEl sue\u00f1o del retorno\u00ab (tr: The Dream of Returning), which can be seen as the continuation of his \u00bbfragmentary chronicle of Central America\u00ab (\u00bbNeue Z\u00fcrcher Zeitung\u00ab), is redolent with the writer\u2019s personal longing for the home from which he was twice driven out. The story is as suspenseful as it is convoluted, as the protagonist, Erasmo Arag\u00f3n, debates whether to take up a doctor\u2019s offer of hypnosis to uncover memories of the civil war that have been deeply buried for a reason, as he worries that if he does so, his political exile could become an existential one.<\/p>\n
Horacio Castellanos Moya received the Manuel Rojas Prize (2014), awarded by the Chilean government to a fiction writer for his work over a career, among others. His exile has taken him to many places, including Frankfurt am Main. He now teaches at the University of Iowa in the United States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11890,"template":"","jct-role":[1080],"jct-origin":[439,1013],"jct-ilb-years":[609],"class_list":["post-39899","authors","type-authors","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","jct-role-author","jct-origin-el-salvador","jct-origin-el-salvador-en","jct-ilb-years-2015-en"],"yoast_head":"\n