Gustavo Faverón Patriau
Peru
Gustavo Faverón Patriau has long been established in the Spanish-speaking world – as a novelist, journalist and academic. He was born in Lima in 1966; his studies took him to the USA. Today he is a professor of Romance languages and literature at Bowdoin College in Brunswick (Maine). Patriau’s prose is formally ambitious; it combines history with pop culture, repeatedly addresses the violent political history of Latin America, and captivates with its sheer extravagance of storytelling.
Unten leben is Patriau’s first novel to be published in German translation. The book is an extraordinary blend of crime novel, horror and historical epic. Taking a murder in 1990s Peru as its starting point, it tells a far-reaching story populated by torturers, agents and artists. For German-language literary critics, Patriau is a revelation: Deutschlandfunk describes Unten leben as ‘an explosive event, sprawling and unsparing’. For his translation of this ‘madness with method’ (Deutschlandfunk Kultur), Manfred Gmeiner was awarded this year’s Leipzig Book Fair Prize.
Unten leben. Novel. Translated from Spanish by Manfred Gmeiner. Droschl 2025
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