Edmundo Paz Soldán

José Edmundo Paz-Soldán Ávila (Cochabamba, 29 March 1967) is a Bolivian writer.

His work is a prominent example of the Latin American literary movement known as McOndo, in which the magical realism of previous Latin American authors is supplanted by modern realism, often with a technological focus.

His work has won several awards.

He has lived in the United States since 1991, and has taught literature at Cornell University since 1997.

Some early pieces were published while he was still at high school.

However, he started writing seriously at age 19 when he was in Buenos Aires, studying International Relations.

He transferred to the University of Alabama in Huntsville, receiving a football scholarship.

A year before graduating, his first collection of short stories, Las máscaras de la nada, was published in Cochabamba.

He has resided in the United States since 1991.

He graduated B.A. in political science in 1991.

His first novel, Días de papel was a finalist in the 1991 Letras de Oro literary competition for United States works.

La materia del deseo (1991) was published in English (2004) as The Matter of Desire, and El delirio de Turing was published in English as Turing's Delirium in 2006.

In Turing’s Delirium, Paz Soldán rewrote entire sequences directly in English for the translated edition, and changed the fundamental motivation of one of the characters; a subsequent Spanish version from Argentina incorporated these changes, but the widely circulated edition is the previous edition from Spain.

The novel won the Erich Guttentag Prize, and was published in 1992.

He obtained an M.A. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in 1993, and a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in 1997, both at University of California, Berkeley.

Río fugitivo (1998) is at one and the same time a Bildungsroman, a detective mystery novel, and a historico-political novel about Bolivia.

Two of his novels have been translated into English.

His PhD thesis was on the life and works of Alcides Arguedas; stemming from this research, a biography was published in 2003.

Two films by Alfonso Mayo, Wednesday Afternoon (2004) and Keeper of the Past (2005), are based on stories by Soldán.

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.

The book was originally conceived as the last in a trilogy with Los vivos y los muertos (2009) and continued with Norte (2011); he had not initially intended it to be science fiction.

He is cultural and political columnist for several newspapers and magazines: La Tercera, El País, The New York Times, Time and Etiqueta Negra.

He has translated some English works to Spanish, including Much Ado About Nothing by Shakespeare and The Seller of Dreams by Ernesto Quiñonez, a US author from Ecuador.

His own works have been translated into several languages and have appeared in anthologies in Europe and America.

He teaches Latin American Literature at Cornell University.

Reviewers have identified in his work a prominent example of the Latin American literary movement known as McOndo, which replaces the magical realism of previous Latin American authors with a technological, modernistic realism.

According to Mario Vargas Llosa, he is one of the most original among the new generation of Latin American authors.

In 2011, he became the first Bolivian to be published by Gallimard.

In 2011, he chaired the jury committee for the first Premio de las Américas for the best work published in Spanish in 2010.

Norte, published in 2011, depicts three experiences of Latin American immigration to the US over an 80-year span.

Billie Ruth was published in 2012.

His first science fiction novel, Iris, published in 2014, was inspired by an article in Rolling Stone magazine about psychopathic soldiers in Afghanistan.