Alejandra Costamagna


Alejandra Costamagna Crivelli is a Chilean writer and journalist.

Biography

Costamagna's parents arrived in Chile from Argentina in 1967. Alejandra Costamagna recalls that her first approach to writing was through journal entries that she began to make irregularly from age 10.
It was in her adolescence when she began to take writing more seriously, after entering Francisco Miranda school when she moved to La Reina. There, Professor Guillermo Peréz "recommended her to read Neruda, Mistral, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, a book which still marks her writing today." In addition, an interview was arranged and she went to the house of her neighbor Nicanor Parra, with whom she spoke about poetry and insomnia, which both shared.

Academic formation

Alejandra studied journalism at Universidad Diego Portales and frequented the workshops of Guillermo Blanco, Pía Barros, Carlos Cerda, and Antonio Skármeta. Later, she studied for a master's degree in Literature at the University of Chile.
She has collaborated in the magazines Gatopardo, Rolling Stone, and El Malpensante. In 1994, she obtained a FONDART grant to write her first novel.
She also received a scholarship from the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, 2003.
Costamagna maintained in 2011 that she likes silence, that she does not want to have children, that she was not worried about having a massive success, and lamented stereotypes about women.

Previous jobs

She was editor of the Culture and Entertainment section of the newspaper La Nación. She worked on Rock & Pop radio station, on Gente de mente and Parque Forestal programs, in which she was the radio speaker. In 1996, she published her first novel called En voz baja. In 2000, her book Malas noches was published and in 2013 she published Había una vez un pájaro. Costamagna has taught literary workshops. Also, she has been a theater commentator for national newspapers and magazines, and has worked as a columnist and chronicler for various magazines.

Writing career

Costamagna published her first novel, En voz baja, in 1996, and followed it two years later with Ciudadano en retiro. Both works received very positive reviews from the writer Roberto Bolaño:
In 2000 her first book of short stories appeared, Malas noches. Although she has continued to write novels, Costamagna has specially developed the , so much so that she even reconverted her first novel into one, "Había una vez un pájaro", which appeared in a 2013 book of the same title, accompanied by two other texts. In El Mercurio, Rodrigo Pinto compared this "calling to purify and clean her texts" with that of José Santos González Vera, who used to republish his works with the warning "corrected and diminished edition", but stressed that in Costamagna it acquired a different and even more radical expression.
Her works have been translated into several languages and have been honored with several awards, including the Altazor and the Anna Seghers-Preis for the best Latin American author of the year.

Current occupation

Nowadays, Alejandra Costamagna is still a writer and one of her last works is called El sistema del tacto, published in 2018.

Works

Books