Alonso Cueto

Alonso Cueto Caballero (born 1954 in Lima, Peru) is a Peruvian author, university professor and newspaper columnist.

His writing career has spanned nearly four decades, during which he has produced dozens of works of fiction, articles and essays.

He has won numerous accolades for his work, and several of his novels have been adapted for film.

The son of Peruvian philosopher and educator Carlos Cueto Fernandini and children's literature promoter Lilly Caballero Elbers, Alonso Cueto spent his early childhood in France and the United States before returning to Peru at the age of seven.

Cueto earned a bachelor's degree in literature from the Catholic University of Peru and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Texas at Austin, where he completed his first collection of short stories, La batalla del pasado.

He returned to Peru in 1984 and published several books over the succeeding decades, including the award-winning Tigre Blanco.

At the same time, he worked as a columnist for several publications and served as director of El Comercio’s El Dominical Sunday supplement.

In 2003, he left El Comercio to pursue writing and teaching full-time.

He is married to Kristeen Keenan Atwook and has two sons -Daniel and Esteban-.

In 2005, he published his best-known novel, La hora azul, in which a wealthy lawyer searches for the woman his military father had taken prisoner during the armed struggle between the Peruvian government and Shining Path rebels.

Mario Vargas Llosa called the book, which won the prestigious Herralde Prize in 2005, "a magnificent novel that lucidly and imaginatively describes the aftermath of 10 years of civil war and terrorism", and J.M. Coetzee describes it as "a dark and disturbing novel".

La hora azul was followed by two spiritual successors, La pasajera and La viajera del viento, to form Redención, the acclaimed trilogy on the years of terrorism and political strife in Peru.

His novels have been translated into sixteen languages, with Frank Wynne's English-language translation of La hora azul, The Blue Hour, winning the Valle Inclán prize for translation.

Besides novels, Cueto has written several short story collections and essays as well as a children's book and a play.

He also teaches in the Department of Literature at the Catholic University of Peru and writes a weekly column for El Comercio newspaper.

Several of Cueto's works have been adapted for film, including La pasajera, which was the inspiration for Magallanes by director Salvador del Solar.

Grandes miradas was adapted into Mariposa negra, a 2006 film by the awarded director Francisco Lombardi, and La hora azul served as the basis for the 2014 movie of the same name by Evelyne Pegot-Ogier.

His novel Grandes Miradas was adapted into a movie (Mariposa Negra) by Francisco Lombardi in 2006.

Cueto's novel La Hora Azul/The Blue Hour which won the Herralde Prize in 2006.

was published in English in 2012 (translated by Frank Wynne) and was shortlisted for the 2013 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and won the Valle Inclán Prize in 2013.

In October, 2020 the University of Texas Press published the English version of The Wind Traveller translated by Frank Wynne and Jessie Mendez Sayer.