Biographical note

Juan Gabriel Vasquez was born in Bogota in 1973. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne between 1996 and 1998, and now lives in Barcelona. His stories have appeared in anthologies in Germany, France, Spain, and Colombia, and he has translated works by E.M. Forster and Victor Hugo, amongst others, into Spanish. His essays, reviews and reportage have appeared in various magazines and literary supplements. He was recently nominated as one of the Bogota 39, South America's most promising writers of the new generation. The Informers is his first novel to be translated into English. Anne McLean has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs and other writings by writers including Carmen Martin Gaite, Orlando Gonzalez, Julio Cortazar and Tomas Eloy Martinez. Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas was a huge international success, selling over 1 million copies worldwide, being translated into more than twenty languages and winning for Cercas and McLean the Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction in the UK in 2004.