On this page you can view the relative “presence,” or prominence, of 158 Spanish‑language Latin American writers across national fields between 1998 and 2017:
- You can select one country to see the top 20 authors there or two countries to compare presence across borders.
- You can also choose to graph the presence authors in their home countries or in groups of countries like "Total Latin America" or "Latin America outside home country".
- When you've made your selection, click Graph to visualize.
Why measure presence?
I created this measure to identify candidates for my corpus. The two decades following the 1998 Spanish publication of The Savage Detectives marked a period when Roberto Bolaño was gaining widespread international attention.
I wanted to identify Latin American writers who were objectively well known in Latin America or in their home countries during this period, but who did not achieve the same success in translation.
How is presence measured?
Presence is measured in two steps:
- Count mentions of each author’s full name in major periodicals in each country using Factiva (1998–2017).
- Normalize that count as a percentage of the top author’s count in that country.
Which writers are included?
The study includes 158 authors from 18 Latin American countries. Some have binationality with Spain or the United States.
I focused on authors who write primarily in prose and had at least one indicator of consecration (a major prize, or inclusion on a critic’s list of the “best novels of the past 25 years”) within a Spanish‑speaking country after 1980.