Guest of the ilb 2003
Darío Jaramillo Agudelo was born in Santa Rosa de
Osos in the province of Antioquia in northwest Colombia in 1947.
He studied Law and Economics at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá.
Dario Jaramillo Agudelo published his first book of poetry
'Historias' in 1974. Four years later his second book of verse
'Tratado de retórica' received the Premio Nacional de Poesía. His
debut novel, 1983's 'La muerte de Alec' - followed by several novels,
including 'Cartas cruzadas' and most recently 'La voz interior' (2006)
- proved him also to be a remarkable prose writer. In spite of
this, as a writer, Darío Jaramillo Agudelo did not want to have to
depend on royalties, scholarships and prize money, which is why, since
1985, he has earned his living as a cultural representative for the
National Bank of Columbia. In 1995 Jaramillo Agudelo was made a
corresponding member of the Colombian Academy of Languages. He
lives in Bogotá. Darío Jaramillo Agudelo's writing overcomes the
gap which today separates poetry and prose; he lets the poetic
stimulate his literature. In an interview with the Mexican
newspaper 'La Jornada' he admitted, "I'm convinced that the only
literary genre is that of poetry. A novel, an essay, a reportage
is only valuable if it conveys poetic
emotion". However, his novels are not
sentimental. They are dominated by topics having to do with the
violent nature of everyday Columbian life, a subject that is also
pursued by Columbia's own literary movement, the 'literatura de la
violencia'. Dario Jaramillo Agudelo became popular above all
through his series 'Poemas de amor'. Together with Juan Gustavo
Cobo Borda, Juan Manuel Roca, Giovanni Quessep, Henry Luque Muñoz, Raúl
Henao, María Mercedes Carranza and Elkin Restrepo, Darío Jaramillo
Agudelo belongs to the so-called 'Generación sin Nombre' ('Generation
without a Name'). He nonetheless does not see Latin and South
American literature as experiencing a creative crisis. Instead,
in Colombia's very dynamic literature scene and publishing landscape a
"wide array of possibilities" (Patricia Salazar) are unfolding.
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