Aaron Shulman in Literary Hub:
“We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.” This certain death came tragically early for the Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño, writer of that lapidary sentence, who died twenty years ago this month at the age of 50.
In the years after his death, though, his literary afterlife grew into one of the most extraordinary in recent memory, especially for an artist who wrote mainly about desperate poets and obscure writers—not material usually predictive of strong sales or worldwide fame. A writer with avant-garde origins who worked in almost total obscurity for most of his career, Bolaño somehow emerged as the first global publishing phenomenon of the 21st century, leaving behind a large body of posthumous work that is still expanding and a life story shot through with mythos and confusion.
Today, what might seem almost as surprising as Bolaño’s extraordinary success, is the fact that two decades after his death no one has yet written a biography of him.
More here.