Biographies. Bibliography

Leila Guerriero

Leila Guerriero is an Argentine journalist, writer, and editor born in Junín in 1967. Her chronicles and profiles explore distinctive lives, from artists and dancers to survivors of the dictatorship. Through sustained research and writing attentive to detail, she has helped broaden the place of narrative journalism within Spanish-language literature.

Timeline

A home with books

Leila Guerriero was born on February 17, 1967, in Junín, Buenos Aires Province. Her father was a chemical engineer; her mother, a teacher by training, devoted herself to the home and her children. Both were readers and gave her ready access to a library where Latin American authors stood alongside popular novels and poetry. Reading was part of domestic life before it became a tool of her trade.

In that library she discovered Horacio Quiroga and Ray Bradbury, while Hugo Pratt’s comics shared shelf space with the Spanish Golden Age poets her mother read. She began writing poems and science fiction stories, not yet knowing how to turn that inclination into a profession. She later moved to Buenos Aires and studied tourism, a choice connected to her interest in travel. She did not pursue a journalism degree: her professional education came later, in newsrooms.

Entering the newsroom

Her start was something of a gamble. Guerriero left a short story, «Ruta cero», at the reception desk of Página/12, hoping it would appear in a supplement that published readers’ writing. The story reached Jorge Lanata, the newspaper’s editor, who decided to publish it and later offered her a job. In 1991 she began her journalism career at Página/30, the monthly magazine associated with the newspaper.

There she shared a newsroom with Martín Caparrós and studied his writing to understand how he introduced a character or handled a change of scene. It was not a matter of abandoning literature but of learning to work with material that could not be invented. Over the years, her reporting appeared in La Nación, Rolling Stone, El Malpensante, and other Latin American outlets, as well as European publications such as El País and Granta. This movement across countries and magazines provided the setting in which she developed much of her work.

The lives behind the news

Her first book, Los suicidas del fin del mundo (2005), grew out of an investigation in Las Heras, an oil town in Santa Cruz where a series of suicides among young people had occurred. Guerriero traveled there and spoke with relatives, friends, and neighbors. Rather than reducing those deaths to a single explanation, she reconstructed the lives that had preceded them and the atmosphere of isolation, unemployment, and rumor that surrounded them. The Patagonian landscape was part of the experience she recounted, not merely its backdrop.

In Frutos extraños (2009), she collected chronicles, profiles, and reflections on her craft published between 2001 and 2008. The volume brought scattered pieces together, revealing the breadth of her interests, from little-known individuals to cultural figures. The following year she received the Premio CEMEX+FNPI in the Text category for «El rastro en los huesos», about the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense. The investigation showed the work required to restore identities to the remains of people who had disappeared during the dictatorship.

Portraits and fieldwork

In 2013, two books appeared that took different approaches to portraying a life. Plano americano collected twenty-one profiles of figures from Spanish American culture, including Nicanor Parra, Idea Vilariño, and Ricardo Piglia. Una historia sencilla (A Simple Story) followed Rodolfo González Alcántara, a malambo dancer preparing to compete at the Laborde festival. Guerriero had traveled there to cover the competition, but González’s performance shifted the focus of her investigation: she began following his daily efforts.

Her reflections on that work took shape in Zona de obras (2014), which collected columns, talks, and lectures about journalism. In it, writing was linked to the conditions that make it possible: conducting research, staying in a place, and reconsidering what one believes one knows. Guerriero also worked as an editor at Gatopardo and Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales and shared her experience in workshops at the Fundación Gabo. Editing and teaching thus accompanied her work as a reporter.

A pianist, memory, and the self

To write Opus Gelber. Retrato de un pianista (2019), she visited Bruno Gelber throughout 2017 at his apartment in the Once neighborhood of Buenos Aires. She supplemented her conversations with the musician with interviews with people close to him and archival research. The book went beyond reconstructing a career: it portrayed his routines and the relationship that developed between interviewee and interviewer. Guerriero explained that her presence in the narrative allowed her to reveal aspects of the pianist that emerged specifically through that relationship.

That same year she published Teoría de la gravedad (Theory of Gravity), a selection of columns written for El País in which personal memories and reading took on greater prominence. Brevity opened up a different register from long-form reporting without displacing it. In La otra guerra (2021), she returned to an investigation of memory and identity, reconstructing the history of the Argentine cemetery in the Falkland Islands and the efforts to identify the soldiers buried there. The book also examined the institutional delays that had prolonged their families’ uncertainty.

Stories that remain open

In 2021 she began interviewing Silvia Labayru, a survivor of the clandestine detention center that operated at the ESMA. That investigation became La llamada (2024). Guerriero gathered testimony and documents to recount both Labayru’s captivity and the violence she suffered, as well as her later life. The portrait avoided confining her to the role of victim: it included her relationships, her decisions, and the conflicts that marked her return to life in freedom.

Also in 2024, she published La dificultad del fantasma. Truman Capote en la Costa Brava, an investigation into the American writer’s stays in Spain. The book set recollections against oft-repeated accounts, revealing the distance between a documented story and its transformation into legend. In 2026, a revised and expanded edition of Frutos extraños appeared, spanning twenty-five years of journalistic work. On May 17 of that year, La llamada received the Premio Strega Europeo in Turin, with recognition shared by its Italian translator, Maria Nicola.

Main works