Héctor Tobar

Héctor Tobar is the Los Angeles-born author of six books, including the novels The Tattooed Soldier and The Last Great Road Bum. His non-fiction Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of Thirty-Three Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle that Set Them Free, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times bestseller; it was adapted into the film The 33. His novel The Barbarian Nurseries was a New York Times Notable Book and won the California Book Award.

Tobar’s fiction has also appeared in Best American Short Stories. He earned his MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and is currently a professor there. As a journalist, he was a foreign correspondent in Latin America and Iraq, and part of the Los Angeles Times team that earned the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News reporting. Tobar has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and National Geographic. In 2020, he received a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard, where he wrote Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino.” He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants.