Biography

Mario Bellatin grew up in Peru

Peru

Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....

 as the son of Peruvian parents. He spent two years studying theology at the seminary Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo and graduated from the University of Lima

University of Lima

The University of Lima is a private university in Lima, the capital of Peru. It was founded in 1962. The decision to create the University of Lima was made in the early 1960s by a group of university professors, along with important commerce and industry representatives. It started with only 120...

. In 1987, Bellatin moved to Cuba

Cuba

The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...

, where he studied screenplay writing at the International Film School Latinoamericana. On his return to Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

 in 1995, he became the director of the Department of Literature and Humanities at the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana and became a member of the National System of Creators of Mexico from 1999 to 2005. He is currently the director of the School of Writers Dynamics in Mexico City.

Works

His work is widely known and distributed, with translations into English, German and French. While he has participated in writing workshops around the United States, his work is very little known in the English-speaking world. Bellatin is celebrated as a leading voice in Spanish fiction for his experimental and fragmented writing, which artfully intertwines reality and creation. As a result of a birth defect that left him missing much of his right arm, a good portion of his fiction concerns characters that are deformed or diseased or with an uncertain sexual identity. Bellatin was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "To me literature is a game, a search for ways to break through borders. But in my work the rules of the game are always obvious, the guts are exposed, and you can see what is being cooked up.”

Awards

• National Book Award, Sponsored by Municipal Institute of Culture, Tourism and Art of Mazatlan, 2008
• Guggenheim grant, 2002

Selected Works

• Flores (Anagrama, 2004)
• The Large Glass (Anagram, 2007)
• Chinese Checkers, trans. Cooper Renner (Ravenna Press, 2007) ISBN 978-0977616299
• Beauty Salon, trans. Kurt Hollander (City Lights Publishers, 2009) ISBN 978-0872864733

External links

• Bellatin in Molossus
• Review of Beauty Salon
• Review of Chinese Checkers
• Larry Rohter. A Mischievous Novelist With an Eye and an Ear for the Unusual, New York Times, 2009-08-09; retrieved 2011-06-07