Gastón Suárez

Gastón Suárez (born January 27, 1929 – November 6, 1984) was a Bolivian novelist and dramatist. Suárez was born in the town of Tupiza in the southern part of Potosí, Bolivia.

A self-taught writer, Suárez abandoned elementary school at third grade, following a traumatizing event in which his teacher suffered an epilepsy attack while reading for him. Ironically, his mother, who was also a rural teacher, accepted to home-school him. When he was ten, after reading Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen by Jules Verne and Jerry of the Islands by Jack London he promised and swore himself to become, some day, a writer.

By the end of the 1950s he decides to fulfill his promise. He quits his job as a banking employee from the Bolivian Mining Bank and buys a truck to travel and know his country in depth. Throughout almost two years of long trips all over Bolivia, he writes simultaneously several of his short stories and finalizes the first draft of his play Vértigo. A few months later he decides to dedicate fully to write literature and make a living out of it.