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

Tobar’s fiction has also appeared twice in Best American Short Stories. He earned his MFA in Fiction from the University of California, Irvine, where he is currently a professor. As a journalist, he was the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Buenos Aires and Mexico City, and has also been an op-ed writer for the New York Times and a contributor to The New Yorker, Harper’s, National Geographic, and other publications.

His most recent book is Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino;” it won the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction and was listed as a best book of the year by The New York Times and Time magazine. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, and in 2023 he served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants.

More on Hector Tobar