Bio

Gwendolyn Harper grew up in Northern California, in an old warehouse taken over by visual artists. She studied English at Yale University, where she worked with Peter Cole, and recently graduated with an MFA in literary arts from Brown University, where she won the John Hawkes Prize in fiction. Her translations and essays have appeared in Poetry, Two Lines, Public Books, the Caravan, and Latin American Literature Today, among other publications, and she is currently working on a full manuscript of Pedro Lemebel’s crónicas.

Project Description

To support the translation from the Spanish of Selected Crónicas by Chilean author Pedro Lemebel. Lemebel (1952-2015) was one of the most important queer writers of 20th-century Latin America. The author of one novel, My Tender Matador, which is currently being adapted into film, Lemebel is most known for his collections of crónicas—short prose pieces originally published in newspapers that blend loose reportage with fictional and essayistic writing. Many of them depict the AIDS crisis in Chile, which in 1984 began to course through Santiago’s underground, overlapping with the final years of the Pinochet dictatorship. This project will translate a book-length sampling of crónicas that Lemebel wrote throughout his career.