Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. Arrested and briefly jailed by the Pinochet regime in 1973, he lived the rest of his life in El Salvador, Mexico, France, and finally Spain, where he settled outside Barcelona. In his early forties, he began to publish short stories and novellas. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. When Roberto Bolaño died, at the age of fifty, he left behind a second full-length novel, 2666, which Picador Australia will publish in 2008.
