For fiction, Im not particularly nationalistic. Im not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.
Daniel AlarconRadio, or at least the kind of radio we're proposing to do, can cut through that. It can reach people who would otherwise never hear your work, and of course I find that very notion inspiring. Radio stories are powerful because the human voice is powerful. It has been and will continue to be the most basic element of storytelling. As a novelist (and I should note that working my novel is the first thing I do in the morning and the very last thing I do before I sleep), shifting into this new medium is entirely logical. It's still narrative, only with different tools.
Daniel AlarconAsk any human being alive if they're the same person they were seven years ago and they're going to tell you they aren't.
Daniel AlarconThere are stories that are by and for Latin Americans, where a certain amount of cultural fluency is expected, where we can delight in the details, the humor, the particularities of speech, of dialects. Something is always lost in translation; we know instinctively that this is the case. A Radio Ambulante story looks at Latin America from the inside.
Daniel AlarconA lot of attention has been paid in Latin America to the new generation of nonfiction writers, authors like Julio Villanueva Chang, Diego Osorno, Cristรณbal Peรฑa, Gabriela Wiener, Leila Guerriero, Cristian Alarcรณn, among others. These are writers doing important, groundbreaking work. So the talent is there, as is the habit of radio listenership, and what we propose to do is unite the two. We want to have these immensely gifted journalists - men and women who've already revitalized the long-form narrative - we want them to tell their stories in sound.
Daniel Alarcon