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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Laura Restrepo

Laura_Restrepo_2013 (Guillermo Ramos Flamerich CC BY-SA 3.0).jpg
Laura Restrepo, 2013 (Photo: Guillermo Ramos Flamerich via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Laura Restrepo was born in the Colombian capital of Bogotá in 1950. At the tail-end of a middle-class upbringing in an intellectual milieu, and on the threshold of a promising academic career, Restrepo left Colombia to join the Partido Socialista Obrero Español in Spain in the aftermath of Franco’s reign, having become involved in militant social activism while still a student. From Spain, Restrepo went to Argentina where she joined clandestine resistance movements opposed to the military dictatorship, before returning to Colombia in the early 1980s and becoming a political journalist. In 1983, she was invited by the Colombian government to take part in pioneering peace negotiations – the first time that the government had entered into negotiations with left-wing guerrilla movements as an alternative to violent confrontation. This involvement would have an immense impact, leading to her life being endangered and her consequent exile to Mexico, where she would remain for six years. Significantly, it was also her departure into exile that instigated the publication of her first book, Historia de una traición, later retitled Historia de un entusiasmo in a 2nd edition. Restrepo has since lived between Colombia and Mexico, and currently lives in Spain, maintaining close links with Colombia. 

The multi-faceted nature of Restrepo’s transnational mobility – which includes taking part in organised international militant activism, the experience of political exile, and a commitment to humanitarian issues of contemporary global significance in the present – is also reflected in the heterogeneous nature of her corpus. Restrepo’s writing has been consistently political, and her representation of contemporary Colombian history (and sometimes Mexican and Argentine history) consistently transgresses conventional generic boundaries between fact and fiction, both of which she treats as equally viable channels for the transmission of history and the expression of the lived experience of historical events. Based on verifiable historical fact, Restrepo’s texts are the product of research in historical archives, interviews with the agents of contemporary history, and fictional embellishment. Read in light of her militant and journalistic background, they suggest that modifying the conventions of representation and authorial perspective can have a real impact on the way that history is understood and transmitted. Her writing offers a vision of a specific reality which questions who and what is deemed an appropriate object of representation, as well as redefining the conventions of the representation and recording of history.

Compiled by Kate Averis (Perth)