Forgive me for a moment while I indulge in an old-fashioned description of Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. Rest for a moment. You are oxygen starved and flushed despite the chill of the mountain air. You have ridden a funicular up to the eighteenth-century Church of the Fallen Lord atop Monserrate, on the eastern lip of the mountains that ring the city. The mountains are verdant. There are copses of wagging green wax palms and sibilant clusters of Colombian oaks. Drifting over from the open-air restaurants behind the church come the smells of wood smoke and grilling chorizo. You’re leaning against a protective stone wall along the cliff edge, staring down from an elevation of 10,000 feet onto the valley fourteen hundred feet below. 

Pilgrims have been climbing to this hilltop for centuries, often on their knees. Behind you the church has positioned fourteen bronze sculptures depicting the Stations of the Cross. Number eleven features a Roman centurion pounding a spike into the arm of the naked Christ. No doubt it once seemed an apt metaphor for the civil wars and violence that troubled Colombia. Twenty years ago, Medellín, the country’s second largest city, was the most dangerous city in the world (the murder rate reached 381 murders per 100,000 people, compared to the current murder rate in New York City of less than 4 killed per 100,000). 

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Bogotá stretches out beneath you. From here, the city lies obscured under the afternoon haze, like an aging starlet under a bubble bath: mischievous, flirtatious, pliable. Only the skyscrapers of the financial district and the Torres del Parque above the bullfighting ring jut up above the haze, stretching invitingly toward the tropical sun.

The old Bogotá was reputed to be a land of frightening violence but also great beauty. The actors included drug lords, Marxist guerillas, government death squads, and the American Drug Enforcement Agency. Internal divisions were enflamed by the regional players in the Cold War. The assassination of a popular political leader in 1948 led to a decade of chaos and killings. In the 1960s, frustrated leftist professors became activist guerilla leaders. In the 1970s, profitable illegal exports of marijuana to the United States evolved into a gushing cocaine pipeline. No one was entirely to blame, but no one was entirely innocent either. In such an environment, it seems a small miracle that writers continued to write, but they did. In the worst of times, Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for novels bubbling with legend, passion, romance, and tragedy. Marquez died in 2014, but Colombian writers have continued to produce some of the most celebrated fiction on the planet. 

Colombia still has its problems, but incidences of murder and violent crime have fallen to rates roughly equal to our North American cities. Two years ago the government ratified a peace treaty with the Marxist guerillas. The drug traffickers that once claimed Colombian territory are said to be terrorizing Mexico now. So maybe now is the time to let Colombia relinquish its status as the reigning Wild West. Maybe now is the proper moment to describe it as beautiful without the underpinnings of violence. Maybe now is the time to meet with the country’s writers and listen as they explain how artists emerge from a war zone and learn to put a century of trauma behind them.

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“One of the strangest ideas any Spanish conquistador could have ever had was to found a city here twenty-six hundred meters over sea level,” says Juan Gabriel Vásquez, echoing sentiments expressed by the narrator of his 2011 novel about the Colombian drug trade, The Sound of Things Falling, originally published in Spanish and released in English by Riverhead Books in 2013. 

Seated beside me on a tasteful modern sofa in his living room, the author watches me through rimless glasses and explains that at the beginning of the twentieth century it took European visitors to Bogotá a couple of weeks to cross the Atlantic by boat and then another seven days to work their way from the coast to the elevated capital. Vásquez is happy to search the past for clues about the present, and he theorizes that the capital’s remote location has negatively impacted the local character. 

“Bogotanos are a closed people,” he says, “not easy.” Vásquez is disappointed with the millions of Bogotanos who voted against a 2016 referendum concerning the peace process. The majority of citizens in the capital voted No, whereas Colombians in the most war-torn areas voted overwhelmingly in favor of peace. The author blames a lack of empathy, and he blames religious conservatism and racial intolerance. “When your capital city, historically, does not accept diversity—racial diversity or foreigners, except the Europeans they look up to—it makes for a complicated present.”

Vásquez, who is a well known author in both Colombia and abroad, has invited me to visit with him to speak about Colombian writing in the apartment he shares with his wife and twin daughters in the tree-lined, upscale northeast corner of the capitol city. 

“Before Márquez there were few novelists, but poetry, we have always had great poets,” he says. He reminds me that one of Bogotá’s nicknames is ‘The South American Athens’ and tells me that, before he could read, he remembers using the books from the shelves of his parents’ home as building blocks. As a student at the private Anglo Colombian School of Bogotá, Vásquez was bilingual from a young age, and he recalls when he was a nine-year-old soccer fan that his father bought him a biography of the soccer star Pelé in English then paid him to translate it into Spanish. 

“I don’t remember a time in which I was not writing,” he says. “I published a short story in the school paper when I was eight.” 

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Juan Gabriel Vásquez 

All the same, Vásquez did not aspire to be a writer as a young man. His father, mother, aunts and uncles were all lawyers. “In the ‘80s, in my social milieu, it wasn’t really easy to think about being a novelist,” he says. He attended law school at Universidad del Rosario, a private university founded by the Dominicans in 1643. But upon graduation, he handed his parents his diploma and moved to Paris to study literature in Spanish at the Sorbonne and start writing in earnest. By age twenty-six, he had published two novels but wasn’t satisfied with them. “I made this mess of a book with techniques from Woolf’s stream of consciousness, Faulkner’s time shifts, Vargas Llosa’s dialogues,” he says. His first two novels were simply a rehearsal, he explains. Searching for a new path, Vásquez accepted an invitation to stay a week with some friends in the Ardennes Forrest in Belgium. A week turned into a month, then three months and nine. The house was ten minutes from the nearest village, thirty minutes from Liege, far enough that he could avoid distractions. During his retreat, he rediscovered Joseph Conrad and the Spanish novelist Javier Marías. And then, “At the very end of my stay, I read a book I found by chance, maybe at an airport or train station, it was—I hope I’m remembering this correctly—American Pastoral by Phillip Roth.”

Emerging from the Ardennes reinvigorated and ready for his next step, he married his girlfriend, Mariana Montoya, a Colombian professional. The pair moved to Barcélona, where Vásquez completed and published The Informers (Riverhead Books, 2010), the first book he feels reflects his voice. After writing three more novels and living for sixteen years in Europe, Vásquez returned with his wife and twin daughters to Bogotá in 2012. We talk about the pillars of Colombian literature, pausing where all discussions about Colombian writers quickly land, on Gabriel García Márquez. Vásquez describes the prejudice Márquez overcame as a young writer. The intellectuals of the capital assumed that great writers could only arise from the urban upper classes and not from a provincial, coastal village. “He suffered from the old centralism of Colombian literature,” Vásquez says.

Vásquez sees Márquez’s early novels as necessary rungs on the ladder toward the Nobel Prize winner’s eventually apotheosis as the éminence grise of Colombian letters. “Leaf Storm [Márquez’s first novel] is so Faulknerian it is almost a caricature,” he says. “No One Writes to the Colonel is almost a rewriting of Old Man and the Sea; In Evil Hour is La Peste [The Plague by Albert Camus], and then there is One Hundred Years of Solitude, maybe one of the most perfect novels in the world.”

Vásquez credits the mature Márquez with transforming literature and, in the process, cementing the confidence of Colombian writers. “He didn’t have One Hundred Years of Solitude to step on; I did. I have received a tradition: a word that comes from the Latin root meaning ‘to give.’ He has given me the book that has enabled me to write the books I have written.”

On the coffee table before us, the author’s mobile phone rings. He apologizes for interrupting our talk and explains that he received word last night that he has won a literary award in Portugal and must fly to Lisbon in the morning.

I glance around the room, admiring an antique mantel clock on a shelf behind us and a framed lithograph of a pair of billiards players—a work by the Colombian painter Saturnino Rodriguez, referenced in Vásquez’s The Sound of Things Falling—above a white brick fireplace. The possessions return me to the theme of class and privilege. Would it have been possible for Vásqez to have succeeded if he hadn’t been born into a privileged family?

“Culture still has an elitist side in Colombia,” the author admits as he returns to our conversation. “Books are expensive. Reading a serious book takes hours, and people who spend four hours a day commuting on a difficult transportation system don’t have that time.” 

On the other hand, he points out that even in a country where the civic commitment of the people is constantly being questioned, the government and the citizens are quick to make books available for the poor. “Any kind of cultural event, a reading or a conversation between writers, will just fill up with people,” he says. “People are thirsty for books.” 

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He reminds me that as part of a government initiative to reinvest in Medellín, the second largest city in the country and capital of the mountainous Antioquia province, authorities built libraries in the city’s most violent neighborhoods. “Twenty years ago, it was the most violent place in Colombia, and now it is a model city, largely due to libraries being built in places where you could not walk,” he says. It seems a liberal fantasy, yet news reports in the New York Times, the Economist, Forbes, CNN, the Guardian, and countless Spanish language outlets trumpet the success of the initiative. Beginning in 2004, ten libraries were built in the centers of small grassy parks in ten troubled neighborhoods. Serving also as community centers and technology centers, the public projects helped to introduce safe spaces and resources into the most crime-infested barrios. 

“Colombia still has a little way to go before becoming a full-fledged, egalitarian, tolerant democracy, which is what I would like it to be,” Vásquez says, “but it is making an effort.”

I leave the writer’s home and make my way south along the shaded sidewalks of his neighborhood, past the French Lycée and the pillared portico of the Club Médico de Bogota. I am far from the impoverished neighborhoods to the south. Although the political violence appears to be coming to an end, the problematic disparity between Colombia’s rich and poor continues. 

To attempt to alleviate the disparity, the municipality assigns each neighborhood a ranking from one to six. The rankings can be found on each resident’s utility bill. In Bogotá, the citizens are reminded of their spot in the social hierarchy every time they open an invoice for electricity, water, or WiFi. 

Somebody living in a one-story dirt-floored room on the south side of the city or a flood-prone mountainside ravine or a zonas de tolerancia, a tolerated red light district, is a one or a two. He or she pays the least amount for basic utilities. The neighborhoods in the northeast quadrant of the city are fours, fives, or sixes. Their proximity to the best private schools, the equestrian clubs, the tennis clubs, and the best shops and restaurants means they pay the most for basic services.

The dramatic social disparities continue to make the city somewhat unsafe. During my time in Bogotá, my friends and acquaintances urge me to be vigilant. I use Ubers and local taxis to get around, and the majority of my interviews are conducted in the northeast neighborhoods where security guards and police maintain a visible presence.

For example, I meet the poet Johan Fabian Pinilla Sanchez at Juan Valdez Café Origenes, a Colombian competitor to Starbucks, in the Rosales district, a number-four neighborhood. Pinilla has dark curly hair and a three-day beard. He wears an unpretentious button-down shirt and blue slacks. We sit at a sidewalk table separated from the street by a concrete planter topped with thick hedges and an awning. 

In addition to being a writer, Pinilla is a professor of philology with a specialization in French language at La Universidad Nacional de Colombia in downtown Bogotá. The school and university systems in Colombia are as divided as the neighborhoods. The wealthy families aspire to send their children to one of the private, centuries-old, church-founded universities like Universidad Javeriana, Universidad del Rosario, or the Universidad de los Andes, while the poorer classes dream of attending the public, leftist Universidad Nacional, which offers tuition on a sliding scale. 

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Pinilla (left) grew up on the south side of Bogotá. “Here in the Rosales neighborhood, you can find a kind of wealthy people, but very close to here you can find the other side of the coin,” he says in English. “In the south is different; we have always poverty, crime, poor education.”

Pinilla’s father drives a taxi and his mother makes clothing out of their home. Pinilla describes his childhood as humble but pleasant; the family had enough money to meet their basic needs. For fifteen years, he was an only child and then his parents had a second son. “It was a surprise for all three of us,” he says with a laugh.

He was a bookish young man. During elementary school, his friends were other children who were serious about their schoolwork. At times, his studiousness isolated him from his peers, and during high school he often felt ostracized. Pinilla began his university studies in electrical engineering at the Universidad Distrital, a public college close to his home. While there, he explored opportunities for work and study overseas and eventually landed a job as an administrative assistant for a publishing company in Luxembourg. There he studied French and discovered a passion for languages, eventually continuing his schooling in Brazil and France before returning to Bogotá and his current post at the Universidad Nacional.

“The National University, it’s important,” he explains. “It was founded in 1867, during the construction of the country. It was the start of an idea of a public education. We associate the construction of the university with the construction of the country.”

Gabriel García Márquez was a graduate, but so were many of the country’s most famous leftwing guerilla leaders. Camilo Torres Restrepo, a charismatic Catholic priest, created the sociology department at the school before leaving in the 1960s to join the National Liberation Army (ELN). (Torres Restrepo may be most famous for his quote, “If Jesus were alive today, He would be a guerrillero.”) And Alfonso Cano was an anthropology student at the university in the 1960s before he joined the Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and rose to lead the group from 2008 until his death in a firefight with government forces in 2011. 

“You can still find the ideas of Che Guevara, ideas of liberation,” Pinella says. “Education is the only way to improve the country, and the university, despite its black history, is an important element in that.”

Pinilla’s interest in poetry coincided with his discovery of his love for the comparative study of languages. A course on morphosyntax, which analyzes the harmonic association between a word’s sound and its meaning, changed the way Pinilla thought about verse. “My poems are not just about meaning but also about sound,” he says. “I’m more aware of syntax elements.”

By 2014, he had written forty or fifty poems, and he could discern a shared theme in enough of them to make a book. “I started to try to have contacts with publishers,” he says, speaking loudly. A small surge of customers have pressed into the café, there’s a line at the register, and a man at the next table bumps the back of my chair. “I have the feeling that here in Colombia,” Pinilla says, “to be a beginner, it’s hard.”

For more than a year, the poet sent hundreds of e-mails to Colombian, Peruvian, Argentinian, Spanish, and French publishers until he heard back from a small Colombian house, Tragaluz Editores. 

“Poetry is not a big seller,” Pinella says. “Most publishing houses don’t carry much poetry. But Tragaluz’s purpose is to be independent, new, fresh.” 

Three months after he submitted his book, they called him. And six months later, his book was released. Pinilla has seen it in four or five bookstores around the city, including the Casa Poesia Silva, a government-run foundation devoted to assisting local writers. Named after the famed Colombian poet José Asunción Silva, a nineteenth-century dandy who was friends with the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé in Paris, Silva modest former home serves as library, bookshop, and community space for writers.

Pinilla’s publisher held a release party for his book at A Seis Menos (Six Hands), a cultural space, restaurant, and gallery located in the city center, but the poet hesitates as he recalls the event. “After the opening, so many people were giving a positive reception, and I asked myself why I made the book. Was it just to hear these congratulations? It was a bit of a crisis. I took a long time without writing,” he says. “Making a book was a kind of altruism,” he says. “I was making a book for the people, for the future. But after the opening, maybe all that altruism was not the true reason. Maybe it was a question of ego:  It was just for me.” 

Despite such doubts, Pinilla has continued to write. Most recently, he released a collaborative book of poems and paintings with Australian visual artist, Mellisa Schellekens. Our interview is winding down, and I ask him if I can photograph him. He agrees, and I reach down to retrieve the red backpack I have wedged between my legs and the concrete planter, but my hand waves through empty air. I feel a sick shock of understanding, like the moment when you realize, too late, that you’ve just driven through a stop sign. 

“My bag is gone,” I say, and I remember the bump from the chair behind me. I’ve lived in cities for decades, yet I failed to notice the effort to distract me while the thief wormed the bag away from my side. I’ve lost my camera, an umbrella, a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap. All replaceable, yet I’m frustrated and annoyed at myself.

Pinilla retrieves the waitress and explains the situation. She says that management will study the video from the CCTV camera aimed at our group of tables in an effort to spot the thief and keep him from returning. 

“I feel ashamed to be a Colombian,” Pinilla says.

I assure him that it could have happened in Rome or New York then snap a photo of him with my iPhone, which was, luckily, in my pocket.

The next morning, a Saturday, I head to the Mercado de Paloquemao, a covered market in the city center. Cocoa and coffee famously grow well in Colombia, but so do Andean ancestral potatoes in a rainbow of colors, the orange-lime lulo fruit, the pulpy aphrodisiac borojó, and a hundred other fruits and vegetables. 

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Outside in the parking lot, the flower market is bright and thick with the smell of roses and lavender. A local friend purchases a bouquet then leads me to a café beneath the corrugated roof of the market where we spend two dollars each on a caldo of potatoes, yucca, catfish, and broth. A couple hours later, we split a paper plate of lechona, made of pork, rice, and peas slow cooked inside the crispy husk of the pig. 

The cornucopia of flavors is an apt analogy for the diversity of styles and personalities that is Colombian culture and writing, which despite its Catholic roots and lingering social conservatism is beginning to publish voices from a wider range of genders, orientations, and perspectives.



Returning to the Juan Valdez coffee shop the next morning, I meet the novelist, playwright, publisher, and teacher Mauricio Arévalo. Slender with olive skin and a sweep of black hair that falls over fashionable red-framed glasses, the twenty-nine-year-old Arévalo has thick black lines like henna tattoos poking out from under his shirt cuffs and twining around his wrists. He explains that he is just back from a trip with his ninth-grade students to the Amazon to visit an indigenous tribe who showed them how to use the juices of the huito fruit, which the tribe uses in sacred ceremonies, to dye the skin. He let his ninth graders paint designs on his arms. “They loved it,” he says, laughing.

 

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Mauricio Arévalo

 

Arévalo has been teaching Spanish literature to high schoolers for almost ten years, but shortly after his award-winning novel, ¿Alguna vez jugaste a las escondidas? (Have You Ever Played Hide & Seek?), was released, he experienced an unexpected sabbatical.

“I was teaching at a Catholic high school,” he says. “I had a bit of a crisis; they were not very happy about my sexual identity.” The school promoted traditional conservative worldviews while Arévalo, who is gay, promoted a more progressive philosophy. “I strongly believe that diversity, as gender and sexual diversity, may become a motor for education.” 

The tensions eventually caused Arévalo to quit and try to make a living as a freelancer, but the income instability made his life difficult. He was wary but relieved when, a year later, he received a call from the country’s most exclusive private high school, the Colegio Nueva Grenada, asking if he was available to teach. The school assured him that his private life would not influence his professional success or failure at the school. He took the job, and the renewed security has enabled him to begin work on a second novel.

I ask Arévalo about his earliest memories of writing, and he recalls a short story he wrote when he was six or seven about three flowers and a girl who had to choose one of them. “Mom and Dad were so proud of me,” he says with a smile. The story earned him a reputation within the family as a reader and writer. His aunt gave him a copy of The Little Prince; his father bought him books from the illustrated series The Adventures of Tintin, which he loved at the time but later rejected after he grew to understand the Neocolonialist politics behind the series.

When he was a thirteen-year-old high school student, Arévalo discovered theater. “I was a very shy child and then theater pushed me to show what I was, that I was a gay man, for instance, and I was not afraid to show who I was.”

When it came time for university, the writer applied for admission to the Universidad de los Andes, the most prestigious and most expensive private university, and they awarded him a scholarship. His tuition was free, but there were other challenges to overcome. He discovered that his classmates had benefitted from enviable private high school educations. “They were so clever,” he says. He was intimidated to watch them taking notes on Macintosh computers while he wrote in his notebook.

It took time, three or four semesters, before he began to feel confident that he could survive at the school. This eventual success he attributes to his professors. “I met a whole bunch of role models,” he says. “Some were writers, some were writing plays, some were theater directors. It was amazing because I learned from the best.”

After four years, his impulse was to continue in academia. He had a plan to earn a PhD in queer studies in Brazilian literature, but then, he says, “I met a man.”

The boyfriend, now his husband (same-sex marriage has been legal in Colombia since a ruling by the national Constitutional Court in the spring of 2016), questioned whether a life of monkish study was the appropriate path for somebody who was so happy in the company of others. “That was when I realized I wanted to write creatively,” he recalls. “That was when I started my first novel.”

Arévalo finished a draft and submitted it to Penguin Random House, the multinational behemoth that represents the largest publishing house in Colombia. He received positive feedback about the quality of the work, but ultimately they rejected it and advised him to try to build an audience with an independent publisher. He submitted to smaller publishers, but months of submissions and e-mails only brought additional rejections. “If no one is going to publish me,” he recalls thinking, “I’m going to become a publisher.”

In 2013, he assembled a staff of five and began producing Revista Artificio (Artifice Magazine), a publication devoted to literature and culture. The periodical was a success, and it helped him broaden his contacts in the Bogotano world of arts and letters. A year later, an artist who illustrated a cover for his magazine introduced him to an independent publisher who read his novel and accepted it then submitted it to the Ministry of Culture, which was sponsoring a contest for new writers. ¿Alguna vez jugaste a las escondidas? won the contest, earning Arévalo publicity and a prize of twenty million pesos, or about eight thousand dollars.

“When you have no name, people don’t buy your books,” he says. “Contests are one of the diving boards for writers in Colombia. It’s one of the channels for new writers to be published.”

The writer describes disparate influences, from Marquez’s Leaf Storm to the TV series Six Feet Under to a novel called Santa Evita by the Argentinian writer Tomás Eloy Martínez, an account of the disposition of the long dead body of Eva Perón, the infamous wife of the former President of Argentina. His second novel is still in the research phase. “My husband calls, and I say I am writing but I’m reading and taking notes.” He is, in a word, still searching for the right voice. 

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Over the winter, this process was interrupted when Arévalo accepted an invitation to join a collaborative playwriting project. The goal was for a group of nine actors, directors, and writers to work together to produce nine individual plays. Arévalo was drawn to the theme of “lockdowns,” the increasingly common practice that schools have developed all over the world to protect themselves from attacks by armed individuals by locking all their doors. He wanted to write about “not being able to move,” and wrote a play about a teacher locked down with his students. “When they are locked down, they have excuses to share their fears that have to do with coming of age,” Arévalo says. He brought the play into his high school classroom and conducted readings with his students. “I approached some issues of sexual violence, and I was afraid of how they would understand it, but they totally got into it,” he says. The play will be published in May, and a movie producer has expressed an interest. Arévalo is currently working on a script.

I ask him about how the years of wars and violence in Colombia have influenced his work, and he explains that writers in their twenties, especially those raised in Bogotá, have been less affected by the years of warfare than previous generations. “From 2010 till now, some writers have been addressing the violence in a different way,” he says. “We heard the stories but we didn’t live the war directly. It was easier for us to talk about reconciliation. From 2010 till now, we create literature about what it might be like to be a country at peace.”

“I think our predecessors could only portray the violence, but they hadn’t time to process and see the complexity behind those issues. We are more reflective. We are testing and allowed to be a different country, to tell a different story. Not the story about the massacre or the kidnapping or the narco-terrorist but instead about, for example, a magical jungle naïf culture.” There are lots of writers like myself who want to write a different country, a different culture—if we don’t we are reliving again and again our violent past. We are reforming, reaffirming, our nation. It’s like starting again.”

I ask him about limitations he has felt due to his social class or sexuality, and he agrees that in Colombia the class divisions are problematic. His family was not rich, and yet he has been afforded opportunities. “But I’m maybe one in ten thousand,” he says.

Arévalo finds that his identity as a gay man has been less of a hurdle. “Literature is one of the worlds that is really open to gender equality. I actually find that being a gay man is better than being a woman in this world. You are still a man in this very machoistic culture.” He describes a recent scandal that is still resonating in the Colombian literary world. In 2017, France and Colombia celebrated a year dedicated to cultural exchange and appreciation, a Temporadas Cruzadas that committed the two governments to cross-cultural events at festivals, theaters, museums, universities, businesses, and other forums throughout the year. In December, as the year was drawing to a close, the Colombian Ministry of Culture selected ten prominent Colombian authors to represent the country on a literary panel in Paris. But the authors chosen were all men, and the biased selection raised the ire of female Colombian writers. A novelist named Carolina Sanin published a letter in a Bogotano newspaper that rocketed her to prominence. 

I contact her and request an interview, but she does not reply and word comes back that she is hesitant to grant in-person interviews in English. So instead, I arrange to interview her editor.
 

Salomé Cohen Monroy greets me at the ground floor entrance to Laguna Libros, a small independent publishing house located in a simple, two-story brick building painted blue with its door flush onto the sidewalk. We are situated just east of the Universidad Nacional in the city center. The neighborhood here is composed of narrow blocks that were once residential and now appear to be populated by small companies. Cohen is twenty-five with auburn hair. She sports a pair of peach-colored, horn-rimmed glasses, wears a leopard-print blouse, bird earrings, and brick-colored Doc Martins with yellow laces. We ascend a narrow set of stairs to a conference table on a second floor landing between two offices. 

Cohen explains that the publishing house’s original plan was to sell inexpensive art books to students and less wealthy art fans. Rather than producing colorful but pricey coffee table books, they made smaller books in black-and-white. “It didn’t work,” she says. So they fell back on plan B: reprinting forgotten or overlooked books by Colombian authors. And they stumbled onto several hits. The first was Baranquilla 2132, a sort of Colombian 1984. Originally published in the 1930s by José Antonio Osorio Lizarazo, it sold well when they re-published it in 2011. Another success has been a collection of letters entitled Memoria por Correspondencia written by Emma Reyes, a Colombian artist and friend of Frida Kahlo, who was famous for her 1960s Parisian salon. The letters, addressed to the Colombian historian and journalist Germán Arciénagas, describe the artist’s horrific childhood.

“We started with a two-thousand-book print run, and in two weeks we needed more,” Cohen says. To date, they’ve sold twenty-three thousand copies. “Which is a lot for the Colombian market.” 

After the book’s national success, Laguna Libros signed deals for translations in eighteen languages including a deal with Penguin Random House for an English edition with the author’s cut from the contract going to an orphanage stipulated by the deceased painter. That edition, entitled The Book of Emma Reyes, was released to acclaim in the United States by Penguin last October.

Cohen confesses that during high school she was “not especially into literature.” She read books about girls with eating disorders and other types of young adult literature. She grew up in Bogotá in an upper-middle-class family. Her mother had been a bohemian who moved in art circles, and when a teacher that Cohen’s mother respected opened a new school devoted to the arts in a new campus, she enrolled her three children. Cohen was the youngest. 

The school, Gimnasio Fontana, was designed by the famed Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona. Active throughout the ’60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, Salmona used red brick to construct buildings with warm organic spaces, curved facades, and public areas featuring trees and grasses. His buildings spawned imitation, and today large swaths of the northeastern Colombian enclaves of Bogotá feature smart, brick apartment complexes interwoven with shade trees and parks. 

Not only did Cohen attend a school designed by the architect, but she currently resides in his most famous work, the Torres del Parque, a pair of residential towers that hover over the Bogotá bullring and the neighboring planetarium. Cohen’s friend, a journalist and magazine editor studying at Columbia University in New York City, has allowed Cohen the use of his apartment while he is away. The buildings rise in cylindrical towers with wings that unfurl like a toreador’s cape. Their presence has revitalized La Macarena, the residential neighborhood at their base, which is near the city center. 

A strong student, Cohen attended the Universidad de los Andes. She began as a political science major, but halfway through her degree discovered that she was more enthralled with books and began taking literature courses. Upon graduating, she applied for jobs with publishing houses, found work manning a booth at the annual Bogotá book fair, then used the connections she made there to hop scotch to her current job with Laguna Libros. She’s been at the press for three years.

Cohen describes a local publishing industry dominated by two or three multinationals with limited avenues for new writers. There are no literary agents. “Well, one Colombian agent,” she says, “but she lives in New York.” When an author signs with Laguna Libros, the publisher splits any foreign publishing deals with the writer. 

Since their start eleven years ago, the publishing house has established three distinct lines of books: overlooked Colombian books, literary fiction by contemporary authors from throughout Spanish America, and a line of graphic novels, sometimes originals and sometimes texts republished from other Spanish-speaking countries.

One successful book in their contemporary line takes place in the Chapinero neighborhood, a bohemian district favored by gay men. Cohen points out that there are many bookstores in the district, and the novel sells well there. One of the publisher’s graphic novels is Uncle Bill, originally published in Mexico, which details the day a drug-addled William Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife with a pistol (he was aiming for the glass she was balancing on her head). 

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During our interview, Felipe González, Cohen’s boss and the founder of Laguna Libros, a bearded man of thirty-four, steps out from his neighboring office and I ask him if Colombian publishers have faced government censorship or threats from the many previously warring parties in the country. González and Cohen smile at the question. There have been political assassinations of newspaper editors in the past, they say, but the various combatants in the country have tended to ignore literary publishers as inconsequential. Some bestselling authors, like Jorge Franco Ramos—whose novel Rosario Tijeras, which has sold more than two hundred thousand copies—have had to contend with pirate publishers selling cheap copies on the streets, but the pair say the pirates don’t waste their time stealing from smaller publishers.

Cohen oversees the line of contemporary novels. To date, she has published more women than men, she says, but she believes this to be unintentional. “It happened spontaneously,” she says. “The things we were getting from women were better than from men. Also if I get a manuscript that’s machista [chauvinist] then I don’t like it.”

At present, the publisher is also working in partnership with the Bogotá municipal government to organize a novel contest open to any Colombian woman writer. Submissions are read by men and women, both Colombian and international judges.

When Cohen isn’t reading submissions, editing books, and organizing contests, she is working on her own writing. She has written articles and book reviews for various online publications, including a story about Bogotá prostitutes and an opinion piece in protest of society’s insistence that women depilate. As part of her efforts to improve as a writer, she has signed up for several creative writing workshops.

A fairly recent phenomenon in Colombia, workshops in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry can be found across the city. Several book stores host eight-week seminars, held weekly and taught by established authors at a typical cost of $175. Creative writing classes are also offered by the municipal authority. These six-month workshops, which typically meet on Saturdays for four hours, are free but require an application and work sample; space is limited, so students must win admittance. 

“People from all social provenances attend,” Cohen says of the workshops. The writing tends to be strong, and the classes have helped her improve her writing while also placing her in circles with talented emerging writers. 

As our conversation winds down, I snap her photo with a borrowed camera, and she helps me call a taxi, but then she recalls an incident of a different kind of literary censorship. Offended by the contents of a book entitled El Tio (The Uncle) by Félix Marin, a powerful and wealthy family supposedly purchased every copy of the publisher’s print run and then had them burned. 

“Every copy?” I ask.

“That’s the story,” she says.

It’s an interesting example, one that I can’t help but compare to the ways people in power work to censor art—and often entire communities—in the United States. Buying the entire print run effectively pays off the publisher and the writer, and enables one to legally squelch an embarrassing tell-all book. It’s censorship, but in capitalist, right-leaning countries, it’s the accepted kind. 

The next evening, I return with some friends to meet Cohen at her apartment, which has a spectacular view of the city. She leads us down into the blocks along the hillside across the street from her home. I’ve been cautioned about wandering too deep into this neighborhood by myself, and Cohen agrees that it would not be wise for a foreigner to explore too far; however, the streets are lined with bars and restaurants. We step into Café Popular, where Cohen greets the manager and the bartender, who recommends a round of flaming gin-and-tonics. Cohen is delighted. She talks about the upcoming Bogotá book fair as we sip our drinks, and there is no need to ask her how she feels about the peace process or the prospects for her country; her opinion is evident in her enthusiasm. Clearly, she and other young people are ready to write the next chapter of Colombia’s story, one in which the guns have been refashioned as pens and celebrity chefs and mixologists have bumped the criminals and narcos off the stages of fame.

Here would be a nice place to end, but I have one final voice to introduce. Hector Abad is a sixty-year-old author from Medellín who was best known for his hyperrealist novels before he released his memoir, El Olvido que Seremos (Forgetting What We Will), published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006 as Oblivion: A Memoir. The book is a plaintive reflection upon his father’s murder. More than that, it is a Proustian examination of Abad’s childhood, his father’s love, and the author’s own encroaching death. In interviews and publicity photos, the author has gray hair, a neat gray beard, and glasses. During a guest appearance on the late Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” on CNN, he displays a gentle good humor. 

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Abad is in Morocco on a literary tour when I visit Colombia, so we exchange questions and answers via e-mail. When I ask him if his country has changed since he published Oblivion, he points out that Medellín was once the most violent city in the world and that now it isn’t even on the list of the top fifty most violent cities. He points out that homicides in his hometown have fallen from 7,500 per year to under a thousand. “We were in hell,“ he writes, “now we are in purgatory.” 

Abad says he is optimistic about the peace process, pointing out that in the last election cycle the political party representing the FARC, one of the former Marxist guerilla groups, participated in the voting and succeeded in winning a few Senate seats. Things appear to be changing.

I ask him how these changes have influenced his writing. 

“Writing about violence was not normal or natural for me,” he responds. “If I did that, it was because violence came into my own home. I couldn’t avoid the argument.”

If I have learned anything from dipping into the literary world of Colombia, it is that violence entered people’s homes without knocking. There are more than fifty million Colombians. When I said at the beginning of this essay that there were no innocent parties in the Colombian civil wars, I was writing too quickly. I meant that among the various armed and warring parties, each shared some of the blame. What I neglected to mention was that the vast majority of Colombians were neither armed nor warring; the vast majority were not interested in war—they were innocent, and they were victims. The writers among them reflected these experiences in their plays, stories, and poems.

Now, as a country that for so long was defined by war emerges from that stretch of darkness, its writers and artists appear ready to turn the focus of their lives and their work toward anything else. 

“Now I am working in subjects less political and much more personal,” Abad says. “Love, beauty, money, art, friendship, envy, greed, passion, natural death, big data, social media. The subjects we all are more interested in when murder is not around.”

Stephen Morison Jr. is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. He has reported on the literary communities of Afghanistan, Albania, China, Denmark, Egypt, Jordan, Myanmar, Rome, Vietnam, North Korea, and Syria. He currently lives in Maine.