Gijon, July 14: Like many Latin American writers, Laura Restrepo has been caught up in the region`s turbulent politics and spent much of her time in exile as well as winning literary prizes.Restrepo missed out on the 1960s Latin American boom which brought writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez to the world`s attention.
Instead, she came to prominence in her native Colombia in 1983 when she was appointed to mediate in peace talks between the government and the M-19 guerrilla group.
After publishing an account of her role in the talks she received death threats and went into exile in Mexico in 1986 and could not return to Colombia until the M-19 disarmed and became a political party.
Amongst other prizes, she has won the Premio Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz awarded in Mexico in 1997 and the Prix France Culture in 1998, a critics` award for the best foreign novel published in France.
Despite the difficulties of living in violent times, Restrepo says she has also drawn inspiration from what she has lived through and says ordinary people rather than heroes are best equipped to tell the story of Latin America.
"We have enormous problems in Latin America, but we also have the enormous privilege to belong to living history, history in the making," Restrepo told a news conference at the Semana Negra book fair in Spain.
"We have the obligation, but also the euphoria of participating in that history, in a continent with brutal social differences but which also knows that it`s future has yet to come, it`s past has yet to be retold and it`s present to be conquered."
In her latest novel, "Demasiados Heroes" (Too Many Heroes), Restrepo tells the story of a mother who returns to Argentina with her teenage son in search of his father, who disappeared during the South American country`s 1980s military dictatorship.
"What I wanted to do here was capture a story of human beings, who could be heard as such," she said. "Heroes smother us, because we don`t live in heroic times."
"There`s something religious about the concept of heroes which tends to blind us, because we live in complex times which don`t allow for a biblical response, which is removed from reality."
Bureau Report
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