Vintage Classics acquires rights to Roberto Bolaño’s backlist

Vintage Classics has acquired the rights to Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s backlist, with major plans to publish his work starting in 2024.

Vintage Classics and Catalogue publishing director Nick Skidmore acquired print, e-book and audio rights from Sarah Chalfant at The Wylie Agency in a deal that will see Bolaño’s fiction, poetry and non-fiction published onto a classics list for the first time.

Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, won the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the 10 best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of 50. Described by the New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666.

Skidmore said: “Roberto Bolaño is one of the most influential and important writers of the past 50 years, and in the two decades since his death we have seen a dramatic reckoning with his immense talents. His books are irrepressibly electrifying – wild encounters with a writer of staggering vision and voracious imagination – and they will endure as some of the major landmarks of 20th-century literature. Vintage Classics are proud to build on Bolaño’s legacy with an exciting and bold reappraisal of his work within our iconic red spine list.”

Of the deal, a spokesperson for the estate of Roberto Bolaño said: “We are excited about this collaboration with Vintage Classics and the opportunity to introduce Roberto Bolaño’s work to an even broader readership and cement his legacy in the minds of those that already know and treasure his books.”