Andrés Neuman

Andrés Neuman, Spanish-Argentinian writer and poet, was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires, where he spent his childhood. He lives in Granada, Spain. He has a degree in Spanish Philology from the University of Granada, where he worked as a teacher of Spanish American literature. At present he has a column in the literary supplement of the daily national newspaper Abc, and he collaborates on numerous Spanish and Latin American media. Through a vote called by the Hay Festival, Neuman was selected among the most outstanding young Latin American authors, being included on the Bogotá-39 list.

At the age of 22 he published his first novel, Bariloche (Anagrama, 1999, paperback edition, 2008), which was distinguished as First Finalist in the Herralde Prize and was selected as one of the best ten novels of the year by El Cultural, the literary supplement of the national daily paper El Mundo. His following novels were La vida en las ventanas (Life in the windows, Espasa-Calpe, 2002, First Finalist in the Primavera Prize) and Una vez Argentina (Once Argentina, Anagrama, 2003).

He has published the books of short stories El que espera (He Who Waits, Anagrama, 2000), El último minuto (The Last Minute, Espasa, 2001, new edition by Páginas de Espuma, 2007) and Alumbramiento (Birth, Páginas de Espuma, 2006). He has been a pioneer in his research into the genre: these collections include theoretical appendices concerning the short story, and he co-ordinated the project Pequeñas Resistencias (Small Resistances), a four volume-anthology of short stories written all over the Spanish-speaking world (Páginas de Espuma, 2002-2005). In this line, it is also worth pointing out his prologue to Uruguayan short-story writer Horacio Quiroga’s Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (Stories of Love Madness and Death, Menoscuarto, 2004).

As a poet, he has published the following books: Métodos de la noche (Methods of the Night, Hiperión, 1988, Antonio Carvajal Prize), El jugador de billar (The Pool Player, Pre-Textos, 2000), El tobogán (The Toboggan, Hiperión, 2002, Hiperión Prize), La canción del antílope (The Antelope’s Song, Pre-Textos, 2003) and Mística abajo (Down Mystic, Acantilado, 2008); as well as the collection of haikus Gotas negras (Black Drops, Plurabelle, 2003, new edition by Berenice, 2007) and the collection of sonnets Sonetos del extraño (Estranger’s Sonnets, Cuadernos del Vigía, 2007).

He is also author of a book of aphorisms and literary essays, El equilibrista (The tightrope walker, Acantilado, 2005), and has translated to Spanish Die Winterreise, the Wilhelm Müller's poems which were put into music by the German composer Franz Schubert (Viaje de invierno, Winter Travel, Acantilado, 2003).

In one of the essays of his book Entre paréntesis (In brackets, Anagrama, 2005, p. 149), the famous Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño stated about Neuman: «He has a gift. No good reader will fail to perceive in these pages something that can only be found in great literature, that which is written by true poets. The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and to a handful of his blood brothers».