罗贝托•波拉尼奥（Roberto Bolaño，1953—2003）出生于智利，父亲是卡车司机和业余拳击手，母亲在学校教授数学和统计学。1968年全家移居墨西哥。1973年波拉尼奥再次回到智利投身社会主义革命却遭到逮捕，差点被杀害。逃回墨西哥后他和好友推动了融合超现实主义、达达主义以及街头剧场的“现实以下主义”（Infrarealism）运动，意图激发拉丁美洲年轻人对生活与文学的热爱。1977年他前往欧洲，最后在西班牙波拉瓦海岸结婚定居。2003年因为肝脏功能损坏，等不到器官移植而在巴塞罗那去世，年仅五十岁。

波拉尼奥四十岁才开始写小说，作品数量却十分惊人，身后留下十部小说、四部短篇小说集以及三部诗集。1998年出版的《荒野侦探》在拉美文坛引起的轰动，不亚于三十年前《百年孤独》出版时的盛况。而其身后出版的《2666》更是引发欧美舆论压倒性好评，均致以杰作、伟大、里程碑、天才等等赞誉。苏珊•桑塔格、约翰•班维尔、科尔姆•托宾、斯蒂芬•金等众多作家对波拉尼奥赞赏有加，更有评论认为此书的出版自此将作者带至塞万提斯，斯特恩，梅尔维尔，普鲁斯特，穆齐尔与品钦的同一队列。

The first story collection by Roberto Bolano --"the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag). Roberto Bolano's story collection "Last Evenings on Earth" was acclaimed by Francine Prose in "The New York Times Book Review" as "something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.... Reading Roberto Bolano is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world." "The melancholy folklore of exile," as Bolano once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. His narrators are usually writers living on the margins and grappling with private (and often unlucky) quests. Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin American and Europe, and peopled by Bolano's beloved "failed generation," these stories are unimaginably gripping. One story begins: "Mauricio Silva, also known as 'The Eye, ' always tried to avoid violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us born in Latin America during the fifties and sixties and were about twenty years old at the time of Salvador Allende's death." "Last Evenings on Earth" has been hailed as "sheer brilliance" ("The San Francisco Chronicle"), "vaguely, pervasively frightening" ("The Nation") and "brilliant" ("Kirkus Reviews"). The stories, as "Publishers Weekly" noted, are "perfectly calibrated: Bolano limns the capacity of a voice to carry despair without shading into bitterness."