Daniel Alarcon
Daniel Alarcon
Daniel Alarcónis 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...
NationalityPeruvian
ProfessionAuthor
CountryPeru
As a boy, I wanted to be the Peruvian Diego Maradona. Sadly, Peru hasnt made the World Cup since 1982, so I guess I did well to choose something different.
For fiction, Im not particularly nationalistic. Im not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.
Radio, or at least the kind of radio we're proposing to do, can cut through that. It can reach people who would otherwise never hear your work, and of course I find that very notion inspiring. Radio stories are powerful because the human voice is powerful. It has been and will continue to be the most basic element of storytelling. As a novelist (and I should note that working my novel is the first thing I do in the morning and the very last thing I do before I sleep), shifting into this new medium is entirely logical. It's still narrative, only with different tools.
When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.
Peru is a country where more than half the people would emigrate if given the chance. Thats half the population that is willing to abandon everything they know for the uncertainty of a life in a foreign land, in another language.
I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.
I guess in my own life I don't really think much about manliness too much. I feel like a lot of men that I know don't sit around thinking, "How am I supposed to be a man?" I don't think that I have to prove anything.
I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.
I like radio because you can do an hour-long interview and then three days later have a finished piece.
The bond between parent and child is chemical, fierce, and inexplicable, even if that parent is a sworn killer. This connection cannot be measured; it at once more subtle and more powerful than science.
I love the novel because it's like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it's going to take you.
The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern.