Episode 057: Daniel Alarcón

Daniel Alarcón is author of the story collection War by Candlelight, a finalist for the 2005 PEN-Hemingway Award, and Lost City Radio, named a Best Novel of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning quarterly published in his native Lima, Peru, and a Contributing Editor to Granta. Alarcón was awarded the 2009 International Literature Prize given by the House of World Culture in Berlin, and was recently named one of The New Yorker’s 20 under 40. His fiction, journalism and translations have appeared in A Public Space, El País, McSweeney’s, n+1, and Harper’s. Alarcón lives in Oakland, California, where he is a Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies. Alarcón read from his work on September 29, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day. The audio was plagued by technical problems, so I’ve transcribed this interview to be read as text. J. ROBERT LENNON: You’re starting a new radio show, Radio Ambulante—can you tell me about it? DANIEL ALARĆON: Like you, I’m sort of a junkie for microphones and recording stuff—in 2007 I was asked to do a long radio documentary for the BBC about Andean migration to Lima. It was a great project, but I was disappointed that some of the best voices didn’t make it to the final edit. They were in Spanish, and you can’t have an entire hour of radio in English with voiceovers; it doesn’t sell. So for a bunch of years I had the idea I’d like to do a project like this in Spanish, and my wife and I finally decided to give it a shot. The idea is to have something like This American Life, but transnational, and in Spanish. We want to collect stories from all over the US and Canada, and also Mexico and South America and beyond. Our idea is that the Americas are a very large and diverse cultural region united by Spanish. At a time when a lot of people are trying to harden the concept of borders, we believe the opposite. We’re very excited, and getting a lot of amazing stories—more than 50 pitches from a dozen counties. JRL: This leads me to some questions about your ficiton…