Marcelo Simonetti loves cooking, photography and football. He is a writer, who over the years has known how to play like a master within the fields of adult narrative and children's and young people's literature. He ventures into the world of letters with a mid-field goal; in 1999 he won the oldest Hispanic story competition: La Felguera (Asturias, Spain) with his tale “El Umbral” (“The Doorway”). He later won the Municipal de Santiago award (Chile, 2003), Casa de América (Spain, 2005), Best Literary Works (Chile, 2014), Marta Brunet (2019) and the National Dramaturgy Show (2019).
As a journalist he has cultivated report and chronicle genres. He has also uses football as a window from where to look at the world by writing sport articles. Started writting children’s literature in 2013 with Tito, a novel whose English version was published in 2017.
The poetry in his texts, an overflowing imagination and the humanity that seeps through his stories, have positioned him into a vital and necessary writer of our times.
The Imaginative Whale
Once upon a time there was a whale who imagined herself strolling under a colorful umbrella in winter mornings and climbing apricot trees in summer evenings.
This was a whale that whenever sadness came for a visit, she imagined she played the double bass in an orchestra and moved to the sound of rumba, mambo and chachachá, until music soaked everything else, carrying away all sadness and suffering.
The Imaginative Whale addresses topics such as tolerance, the right to be different and the power of imagination, based on a story in which a young whale imagines things that not all whales imagine. Although the other whales will see in her difference a danger, she will not renounce to her imagination which will be at the same time refuge and hope for a better world.
The book possesses an innovative interior look created through laser cut which allows to see through its pages, forming different layers as if we were at the bottom of the sea.
Drawings of Hiroshima
From the day his grandfather died, Renzo Nakata remembered two things. The butterfly that entered the bedroom a few seconds after he stopped breathing. And the last words that came out of his mouth, which were strictly speaking only one: “Hiroshima, Hiroshima”. No one was surprised that when death was imminent, the grandfather remembered the city where he was born and lived until his parents opted for a different life on the other side of the world. However, for Renzo those words contained something else, a kind of encrypted message that the grandfather had dropped as if revealing a pending account.
MARCELO SIMONETTI
2014: Best Literary Work for the best unpublished storybook
2005: Casa de América Award for Innovative Narrative
2003: Municipal Award of Santiago
1999: La Felguera Award
This is a novel that links Japan with Chile through the story of a grandfather and his grandson. It begins with the last words spoken by Ryu Nakata, a Japanese native of Hiroshima who, like many of his compatriots, crossed the Pacific Ocean with his family at the beginning of the last century to find a new home in Latin America.
«A novel about family inheritance and the ghosts that inhabit the other side of the planet. A tragedy anticipated by a group of children who, ten years before, in a Hiroshima school, drew, without knowing what it was about, the atomic mushroom that would wipe out everything. A moving story, written with precision: Marcelo Simonetti is back».
Borges' Treason
The information was unvarnished and covered only a few lines in the International News in brief section. “Fake Chilean Borges Arrested” preached the headline, and bellow it was detailed that “a Chilean man was arrested in front of the Casa Rosada, right in the heart of Buenos Aires, under circumstances in which the man was pretending to be the celebrated Argentinian writer who passed away one week ago, Jorge Luis Borges. Antonio Libur had to read three times the paragraph before having a reaction. He wised up from the morning sunlight that in mid-June is barely warm, left the cement bench he was sat on, and started walking with the folded newspaper under his arm. He realized the news had disturbed him because he was walking scatterbrained, unable to avoid the puddles the rain left during the weekend. His mind was blank.
MARCELO SIMONETTI
2014: Best Literary Work for the best unpublished storybook
2005: Casa de América Award for Innovative Narrative
2003: Municipal Award of Santiago
1999: La Felguera Award
When Jorge Luis Borges dies, in 1986, Emilia Forch convinces a mediocre actor but famous for his interpretation of the Argentine writer, that he is the real Jorge Luis Borges. This new Borges decides to join the adventure and assumes the role completely. Both leave Chile and settle in Buenos Aires to convince everyone that Borges is still alive. The success of the farce and the love that arises between them will be threatened by the presence of Antonio Libur, Chilean plagiarist writer who travels to the Argentine capital to recover his old girlfriend, Emilia.
The story takes place against the backdrop of an Argentina convulsed by the conquest of the FIFA World Cup by Diego Armando Maradona.
A master in the creation of flesh and blood characters, who at the same time show their small human weaknesses, Marcelo Simonetti dazzled the jury of the Casa de América Award with this novel.