Peruvian short story writer
Alexis Iparraguirre
Alexis Iparraguirre (Lima, April 8, 1974) is a Peruvian short story writer and literary critic. In 2004, he won the PUCP National Prize for fiction.[1]
In 2013, the Guadalajara International Book Fair chose him as part of Latinoamérica viva, its annual meeting for emerging Latin American literary voices, and, in 2021, he was included in a list of ten essential Peruvian writers (“diez autores peruanos imprescindibles”) at the beginning of the 21st Century by the Spanish daily newspaper El País.
Biography
Alexis Iparraguirre studied Hispanic Literature at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. In 2000, he won the PUCP Student Union’s Literary Prize for fiction, and four years later, in 2004, El inventario de las naves (Inventory of Ships), his then unpublished collection of short stories, won the PUCP National Prize for fiction.[2]
In 2011, he moved to the United States, obtaining an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University, and a Ph.D. in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures from the Graduate Center, CUNY. Since 2014 he has taught Spanish and Hispanic Cultures at The City College of New York (CCNY) and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, as well as independent creative writing workshops.
Following the publication of El inventario de las naves, in 2005, several of Iparraguirre’s short stories appeared in Peruvian, Latin American and Latino anthologies, including Selección peruana 1990-2005 (2005), El futuro no es nuestro (2008), El cuento peruano 2001-2010 (2013), and Estados Hispanos de América. Narrativa latinoamericana made in USA (2016). In 2016, her second book of short stories, El fuego de las multitudes (Fire of Crowds) was chosen short story book of the year by most of the cultural columns in Peruvian press, including the daily newspaper Perú21’s [3] and the political magazine Caretas’.[4]
In 2021, the Spanish daily newspaper El País, chose Iparraguirre as one of the ten essential contemporary Peruvian writers (“diez narradores peruanos imprescindibles”)[5]
In 2022, he co-edited with Francisco Joaquín Marro Esta realidad no existe (This Reality Does Not Exist), a collection of 14 science fiction short stories by Peruvian writers.
Currently, Iparraguirre’s works has been partially translated into English.
Themes
According to Carlos Amador: "In Peruvian writer Alexis Iparraguirre's short story collection, El inventario de las naves (2005), the short stories "Orestes" and "Sábado" manifest the specific role that racialized, lumpenproletarian life, ecological collapse, and biomechanical engineering, in the form of hallucinogens or mutants, have in developing literature's reflective and predictive capacity. Set in a Peru stripped down to its barest national markers, Iparraguirre's stories write about the way in which everyday life, comprising Peruvian economic contradictions and colonial racial hierarchies, is marked in the logics of enfleshing into discourses of subjectivity. The precariousness of social life and the ways which the matter of the world is social, effectual, and dynamic are represented as an agent, an actively material sphere that unsettles historical blindnesses and challenges binary logic of the human and non-human."[6]
