Laura Restrepo

Laura Restrepo (born 1950 in Bogotá, Colombia) is a Colombian author who began writing what were mainly political columns in her mid-twenties.

Her first novel, Isle of Passion, is based on historical deeds that occurred on Clipperton Island.

Laura Restrepo is the older of two sisters.

Her grandfather was self-educated and spoke six languages.

Her father left school age of 13 to go out to work before becoming a businessman.

According to Restrepo, her father would take her and her mother with him on his business travels and they never stayed long enough in one place to attend a full year of school.

Once she attended a public school in California for only one day because her father took the family somewhere else the next day.

When she was around ten years old her formal education consisted of six months at a ceramics night school in Denmark.

When she and her family went to Madrid the school did not accept her because she failed the required admission tests for arithmetic, grammar, sewing, and embroidery.

So instead, she went to a flamenco guitar teacher.

Her father took her to visit museums, theaters, ruins, and to climb volcanoes and watch geysers.

He introduced her to composers such as Bartók, Prokofiev and Stravinsky.

By the time she was 14 she was reading books but did not know the full multiplication table.

She moved back to Colombia age fifteen where she had to work hard to earn a high school degree as she had not taken the required subjects previously but in spite of this, she was able to obtain her diploma.

She was the first person in her father's family to receive a diploma.

Soon after she got her diploma, she enrolled at the University of the Andes, Colombia.

In her sophomore year in college, at the age of 16, she wrote "that beyond the nuclear family and the land of wonders that is high culture, there lay a whole universe to be explored that was broad and remote, fierce and exciting."

She cut her ties to her father and never saw him again before his death a few years later.

She gave up her teaching job and got involved in Colombian politics before joining the Socialist Workers Party in Spain, then soon went to Argentina for four years where she was part of the underground resistance that opposed the military dictatorship.

After three years with the Socialist Workers Party in Madrid she became a journalist.

Laura Restrepo technically began writing when she was nine years old.

She began writing in love, memory, and just to get the feeling of being close to him again.

She returned to Colombia after three years in the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and began writing for Semana, a magazine, in the national and international politics section.

During this time, she traveled to different places including Grenada to report on the invasion and to the Nicaragua-Honduras border to report on the war between the Sandinistas and the Contras.

During her time working for Semana she met Gabriel García Márquez.

Although feeling lucky to be acquainted with him she also criticized him for his writing style of magic realism.

Over time she became the political editor of Semana and wrote about ongoing peace negotiations.

Restrepo voiced her opinions loudly over the failing peace treaties and the conflict that was going and received death threats and was forced into a six-year exile in Mexico.

Many of the investigations she did end up as plots or ideas in many of her novels.

Her first novel was Isle of Passion which uses her normal style of investigative journalism and fiction to create a sense of wonder while it is being read.

She wrote this novel while she was in Mexico, seeing as she missed Colombia so much, she decided to begin a story.

Leopard in the Sun was Restrepo's second novel.

This novel started with a story that Restrepo had been sent to cover a story about two families trying to kill each other.

Eventually she finds out they were involved in the drug cartels in Colombia.

She says, "she never used the word 'drugs' in the novel, because she is convinced that 'all readers read between the lines'".

Dulce Compañia is a non-traditional Restrepo novel.

She uses religious beings in this novel when in fact she never had formal religious training.

Restrepo has won several awards for this novel.

In 1982 Belisario Betancur, the president of Colombia at the time, added Restrepo to the negotiating commission to negotiate peace with the M-19 guerrillas.

After Restrepo's experience as a commissioner of peace she left the field of journalism, received death threats and was forced into exile in Mexico for six years.