Antonio Ortuño

Antonio Ortuño Sahagún (born 1976 in Zapopan ) is a Mexican journalist and writer. In 2010, Granta Books magazine placed Ortuño on the list of the most important young Spanish-speaking writers.

Life

Antonio Ortuño is the descendant of immigrant republican Spaniards. He worked for the Milenio newspaper for a few years . He also writes articles for cultural magazines such as Letras Libres and La Tempestad .

His first novel, El buscador de cabezas , was published in 2006 and was voted the best debut of the year by Reforma newspaper . His style is characterized by sarcasm, black humor and explicit depictions of violence, sometimes exaggerated into the grotesque. In the novel La fila india (2013, dt. Die Verbrannten ) an investigator has to solve the murder of numerous migrants (Mexico as a transit country) who died as a result of arson in their emergency shelter.

As a DAAD scholarship holder, Ortuño and his wife and daughters were able to live and work in Berlin for a year in 2018/19. The Spanish and German editions of the novel The Disappeared appeared almost simultaneously in June 2019. It is the story of a protagonist who has been innocently in prison for many years out of loyalty to his criminal father-in-law, wife and child, who has to find his way around the organized crime milieu of the western Mexican city of Guadalajara after his release .

Works

Novels

El buscador de cabezas , 2006
Recursos humanos , 2007
Ánima , 2011
La fila India , 2013
- Die Verbrannten , novel, translation by Nora Haller. Munich: Verlag Antje Kunstmann , 2015. ISBN 978-3-95614-055-6 .
Méjico , 2015
- Madrid, Mexico , novel, translation by Hans-Joachim Hartstein. Munich: Antje Kunstmann, 2017. ISBN 978-3-95614-165-2 .
El rastro , 2016
Olinka , 2019
- The disappeared , novel, translation by Hans-Joachim Hartstein. Munich: Antje Kunstmann, 2019. ISBN 978-3-95614-285-7 .