Authors such as Javier Cercas, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Leila Guerriero demystify the legal biography to recreate real lives by sticking to the facts.
The blending of genres and more literary language come together to create fictionalized biographies. In recent years, more than a dozen writers from Spain and Latin America have removed the aura of sacredness of the official biographical genre to recreate or fictionalize without straying from the truth.
They do so “with tools more typical of fiction, but without inventing things, in order to extract significant aspects of these lives that the lives themselves do not reveal,” explains Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of ‘Los nombres de Feliza’ (Alfaguara), about the Colombian artist Feliza Bursztyn, who “died of sadness,” according to Gabriel García Márquez.
