People like Santiago Roncagliolo

Santiago Rafael Roncagliolo Lohmann (born March 29, 1975) is a Peruvian writer, screenwriter, translator, and journalist. He has written five novels about fear. He is also author of a trilogy of non-fiction books on Latin America during the twentieth century.

He is the son of the diplomat and politician, Rafael Roncagliolo (1944–2021), who was the Minister of foreign affairs of Peru from 2011 to 2013.

Born in Lima, Peru, Santiago Roncagliolo spent part of his childhood in Mexico, where his family was exiled. As he says: "I grew up in a family of exiles. My classmates were children from Chile, Argentina, Central America or Uruguay. We went to school with shirts of the Sandinista National Liberation Front and played games of "popular war". And above all, we believed that some day we would have a revolution, whatever it was that. But when I returned to Peru, there was already a revolution under way: The Shining Path, and it was not nice. It was made of blackouts, fear, bombs and dead people." There, Roncagliolo met the fear, that is the obsession of all his novels. That experience was also the subject of his novel Red April and his non-fiction book La Cuarta Espada.