Patricio Jara
Patricio Jara Álvarez (born 4 May 1974) is a Chilean writer and journalist. Biography. Patricio Jara grew up in Antofagasta and studied at the Jesuit Colegio San Luis, where he wrote his first stories. Later he entered , where he qualified as a journalist in 1996. In his time as a university student he won his first prizes. He worked at his alma mater and was coordinator of the literature program when it became the . As a professor Jara has taught at various higher education establishments, such as (Antofagasta campus), Diego Portales University (UDP) in Santiago, and Finis Terrae  University (UFT). His articles have appeared in various media such as the "Revista de Libros" and "Sábado" (both of "El Mercurio"), "Qué Pasa", and "The Clinic". An extreme rock fan, he has published chronicles in "Rolling Stone" and written a kind of personal history of national metal music, as well as a biography of the Chilean death/thrash metal band Pentagram. Since 2004 he has lived in Santiago, in the neighborhood of Ñuñoa, near the National Stadium, where he attends football matches. His love for this sport has been reflected in "Marihuana Álvarez", which was part of "Gente que va  al estadio" (1997, with a foreword by Hernán Rivera Letelier), a book that also includes stories by two other journalists. In addition to teaching at UDP, he is an editor for Ediciones B. He is married and has two daughters. Literary career. The first book published by Jara was a compilation of his stories, "Última ronda", which appeared in Antofagasta in 1996. Although he has continued to work in the short fiction genre, it is with his novels that he has achieved notoriety. In the first of these, he did not go far from the story, because it was a  short novel destined for the youth audience, "Ave satani" (1999), which, reissued by Alfaguara in 2004, became "De aquí se ve tu casa", and which reflects Jara's love for heavy metal. His consecration in Chile came in 2002, when he won the award of the National Book and Reading Council for best unpublished novel of the year with "El sangrado". It was at that time that the magazine "Qué Pasa" included him, together with Marcelo Simonetti and Alejandro Cabrera, in "the trio of the country's literary renewal", and Hernán Rivera Letelier wrote about Jara: "He always showed himself  to be a literary animal. He eats, dreams, and fornicates literature. I see him as the leader of the "nortina" squad, holding strong in Santiago." His subsequent novels include, "Prat" (a fictional story of the naval hero Arturo Prat), "Quemar un pueblo" (2009), and "Geología de un planeta desierto" (2013). The latter, praised by critics, contains autobiographical material of the relationship with his father (who died in 1998, "after a hard decade of alcoholism"), which was reflected in the evolution of the title. Jara called it first "Géologo", then "Novela de papá", and finally "Geología..." As for the influences on  this work, he recognizes that of Michel Houellebecq, an author who "appears as a character at the end of the novel." Jara's writing process is usually long, and sometimes takes years from the idea for a novel until the final version. In 2009, the year in which three of his books appeared, he explained in an interview: "I had thought of "Prat" since 2004 and I wrote it in 2008. I have been working on the stories in "Las zapatillas..." since 1994, back in my university days. And I began writing parts of "Quemar un pueblo" in 2005, when  I was still living in Antofagasta."