Octavio Escobar Giraldo

Octavio Escobar Giraldo is a Colombian physician and writer. He won the International Short Novel Award Ciudad de Barbastro XLV (2014) and the National Award for Best Novel from the (Colombian) Ministry of Culture (2016) for Después y antes de Dios. His narrative style is substantially influenced by television, music, cinema because, as he himself states, he went more to the movies than to class. He is the Director of the Manizales Book Fair, which he founded in 2009. He is a professor at the graduate school of Fine Arts and Humanities at the University of Caldas, located in the city where he was born, Manizales, Colombia. His trio of noir novels take on difficult social themes pertaining to the violence, the paramilitaries, and the false positives scandal, the over six thousand young people who were kidnapped and murdered by the Colombian military to meet quotas in the war against the guerrilla forces in the Colombian coffee growing axis, the mountainous region where the author was born and has spent his life.