For the next four days, the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez is making a house boat perched on the top floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, his home and study.

Juan was one of the up-and-coming Latin-American writers under 40 who were selected for the Bogota 39. His novels The Informers (2004) and The Secret History of Costaguana (2007) both riff on the legacy of Joseph Conrad – the former in the form of a politically complex thriller of Colombia in the 1980s and 90s, and the later through a picaresque account of the shenanigans surrounding the building of the Panama canal. Last year he won the richest prize for Spanish literature, the Premio Alfaguara.
He is the first writer to stay in the boat as part of Artangel's year long project, A London Address. He'll use his four days aboard the boat to write a specially commissioned piece on the theme of London and The Roi des Belges, the boat Conrad commanded on the Congo. He will also take part in live author webchat with Guardian books site readers. Here is your chance to put your questions to Juan.

Juan will be here between 4pm and 5pm (GMT) on Wednesday 25 January to chat. Post your questions for Juan in the thread below and then check back on Wednesday to join in the conversation.

We've posted the conversation above the line to make it easier to follow.

SazzleinBelfast asks:

I'm a researcher in translation and train university students to become freelance translators - I'm keen to know what your philosophy is on translation and if your own work as a translator of Victor Hugo and E.M Forster influences how you work with the translators of your own work?

Saludos!

Juan Gabriel Vásquez replies:

Hello and thank you for your question. Since I'm not a professional translator, my philosophy is quite utilitarian: I have always regarded translation as the best school a novelist can have. Let's agree that translators are the perfect readers: nobody reads as closely, as accurately, as sympathetically, with as much solidarity and generosity, as a translator. If this is true, then there is no better way to understand how a work of fiction works than through translation. As for my own translations, I have learned enormously from every one of them, even from the bad books – especially from the bad books, because translating them you notice firsthand the shortcuts, the lies, the cheating.

C1aireA asks:

Both The Informers and The Secret History of Costaguana reference Conrad's work. What is it about him that you find so powerful and do you think he has a special relevance to Latin American writers?

Juan replies:

Those are two very different novels and Conrad is there in very different ways. In The Informers, he is undoubtedly an influence, a sort of tutelary god always looking over my shoulder (and I resent him for it). In The Secret History, however, he was a character - and sometimes just a metaphor. I think he should have a particular relevance for Latin American novelists, but that doesn't seem to be the case (for older generations, Faulkner or Joyce seemed to be more important). Nostromo, however, is perhaps the best novel written about Latin America outside the Spanish language; it has more to do with the great Latin American novels of the sixties than any Latin American novel. But I feel close to him for personal reasons: his life as an expatriate, his difficulties with his own literary tradition, the feeling that he didn't belong in just one culture (or language).

AggieH asks:

[Quoting her own earlier question]"Do you translate your own work into English?" Ignorant question. My apologies to Anne McLean. If I amn't barred from the thread for stupidity, my other questions still stand though. Especially the collaboration would be interesting to hear about.

Juan replies:

Hello. Apologies accepted on behalf of Anne, and of course your other questions still stand! Well, I do work very closely with her. As a translator, however, I know that there can be fewer things as terrible as a novelist who thinks he knows your language – and sets out therefore to teach English to the English. So, all the time keeping in mind that the English language still has mysteries, I try to involve myself as much as I can in the process, changing whole sentences if it is necessary for reasons of euphony, but always relying heavily on Anne McLean's talent and impeccable ear. She's fully authorized to kill off a character if the sentence sounds better that way. (She has never dared.) Do I drive my translators to distraction? In the case of the three languages I can read, I think I drive them to madness. For the rest of them, I have a tendency to trust translators, mainly because nobody does it for the money.

arneDu asks:

Thank you for enjoyable reading. I observe that many writers need a distance to their own country in order to approach it through fictional writing.

Is living abroad important to you as a writer? Do you think the issues you are dealing with in your books - such as deceit and betrayal - would have been depicted differently if you still lived in Colombia?

Juan replies:

Hello. Well, let me put it this way: leaving Colombia 16 years ago has perhaps been the single most important decision I have made. But it is an old and clichéd tradition: it's as if Latin Americans had to do it. Just talking about the Latin American boom, you see great Colombian novels being written in Mexico (One Hundred Years of Solitude), great Peruvian novels being written in Spain (The War of the End of the World), great Mexican novels being written London (Terra Nostra), great Argentinean novels being written in Paris (Hopscotch). Why? I don't really know. Do you see things with more clarity from the outside? In my case, living abroad is what allowed me to write about Colombia. I think leaving helped me understand what was universal about my personal experiences or my country's past. And there's also a question of temperament: I feel better as an immigrant, living in places where I do not belong. Writing novels is very difficult and you should try to reduce those difficulties as much as you can.

RosalindHarvey asks:

I'm a translator of fiction and co-translated Héctor Abad's memoir 'Oblivion' with Anne McLean, who introduced me to your books, and so firstly I'd like to thank you for your beautiful and necessary novels.

You said in an interview once that 'not understanding something is perhaps the best reason a novelist can have to write about it', and that this kind of writing is a sort of 'finding out '.
I'm interested in the idea that this also happens when writers write about things in their own personal histories that perhaps they don't understand or weren't aware of, whether in straight autobiographies or in books with autobiographical elements. Did you discover new things about yourself while writing any of your books, and is it possible to control how much of yourself you put into your writing?
Gracias

Juan replies:

Hello, Rosalind. Thank you for showing up (and congratulations on your rendering of Abad's beautiful book). When I said that I was talking about my troublesome realization that I didn't understand my country and so felt I wasn't allowed to write about it. But of course the idea applies to every experience, whether social or personal: fiction is a process of discovery, of going into a place you haven't been to or don't fully know (an area of darkness), and trying to come back with the news. And of course sometimes you find out things you didn't particularly want to face; but great novelists are people who never, never close their eyes. As a reader, I think you notice that: you know when the author is just looking the other way when dealing with a difficult truth. Javier Marías talks of "recognition": in a good novel you come across things that you knew, but you didn't know you knew. Those are wonderful moments, part of the reason we read fiction.

AggieH asks:

You write novels, short stories, essays and reportage.

Let's pretend that you must give up all but one of these forms of writing. You will simply not be allowed out of that house boat until you have agreed that you will only ever practice one of those writing forms again ever ever in the future.

Which one?

Juan replies:

Well, what a mean world you can imagine. I would choose novels. I am a novelist, whether I like it or not. I write essays to learn to read so that I can write novels. I would miss short stories, sure.

luceritoG asks:

In 'The Art of Distortion' you write that:

'We novelists understand that the only way to reveal the past is to treat it as a narrative product, therefore susceptible to being retold by any means.' (my translation, I hope that's OK!)

What do you think is the role of literature, of narrative, then, in re-imagining the past of a country like Colombia where certain national or historical narratives have become myth, like those of the Bogotazo and La Violencia?

How can retelling the past help to shape the present?

Is there a way to retell a violent history without resorting to the sensationalism of 'narcoliterature'?

Juan replies:

Hi there. Well, I have always thought that the role of fiction, when dealing with the historical past, is to tell us things we can't find anywhere else. Fiction should not be redundant. I don't care too much for novelizations of history: War and Peace is not great because it is perfectly accurate, but because it allows us into places where even the best historiography can't go. The thing in Colombia us that we learned the lesson well: that period called La Violencia (around mid-century; 300,000 deaths) produced so much bad, immediate literature that a young novelist called García Márquez was forced to question the whole approach. He thought that novels should not reproduce reality, but reconfigure it. Look at it from the side, if you will. Tell us something neither journalism nor historiography can.

As for your last question, I have certainly tried. My last novel has, anyway. It will probably be published at the end of the year in the UK, so you can tell me what you think.

patasola asks:

Why has it taken Colombian authors so long to deal with the country's murky and corrupt contemporary politics? I enjoyed Los Informantes because it showed the Colombia of today, without the stock cliches of literary Latin America or folclorismo.

So much Colombian writing seems either to deal with the distant past of La Violencia or generic narco-stories (Rosario Tijeras etc). Los Ejercitos won prizes, but dealt with today's violence in a non-specific, almost mythical way. I've long thought the narco-para-corruption of Colombia's national and local politics would be perfect for a James Ellroy-style dissection. Monteria Confidential, if you will.

Juan replies:

I often ask myself that. But I think fiction always takes a little while to deal with reality, doesn't it? Novels that successfully explore their present moment are very, very rare, if only because they take two or three years to write, and the present they were in at the beginning is not there anymore when they end. Los ejércitos (The Armies) is a successful novel because it stylizes its subject matter instead of taking it head on, as great journalists have done. I know the most recent events dealt with in my fiction happened 16 years ago. We need that kind of perspective, I think. But Monteria Confidential does seem appealing…

Gavesend123 asks:

Can you tell us what it's been like working in A Room for London?

Juan replies:

Hello. Nice Conradian nickname. A Room for London is an astonishing project – I suspect it will be one of those things that stay with you for a very long time, and I'm really very grateful. For a novelist, the greatest gift is the gift of time; and time on board my rooftop boat has been so concentrated, and the place so incredibly stimulating, that for the past four days I have been living an alternative life, really living inside the Conrad novels I'm reading and even seeing things I had not seen before. This I have tried to explain in a short text I have written (that was the whole purpose). Plus, the boat is full of great books. An ideal place to begin a new novel. Who knows?

JustineJordan asks:

Could you tell us about what you're working on at the moment? Are you bringing work in progress to A Room for London, or starting something new?

Juan replies:

For three whole days I have been thinking about Conrad's novels. Three in particular: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent. I wrote a small text trying to suggest how amazing it was that those three novels, published between 1899 and 1907, anticipate every major issue the world had to deal with during the XX century. Today I've been writing the last lines of that essay. And looking at London through my fourteen windows. (Oh, and rereading Michael Ondaatje's beautiful The Cat's Table.)

But I published my last novel in Spanish less than a year ago, so no, no work in progress. Anxieties in progress, maybe.

MCosta asks:

I remember you saying, while discussing Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, that being a Colombian didn't mean you had to write forcibly about the country's political situation and the ensuing violence. What made you decide to write about it?
Reading your last comment I wonder if the growing distance has anything to do with that. In your first book, the stories where set in central Europe, as a matter of fact, and you have since come closer and closer to a subject you seemed to reject, a few years back.
Are you working on anything at the moment?

Juan replies:

Hi, M. That book of stories was written at a time in which I didn't think I could write about Colombia: after all, I had left the place with a feeling of tension or even rejection I felt I didn't understand it. In a way, I thought fiction should be written in response to what you know. (Write about what you know.) So I wrote that book of stories. But then, through the discovery of certain novelists and through certain personal experiences, I think I understood that not knowing (myself, my country) was as good as reason as anything. And I have been obsessively trying to explore what I don't know, which is a lot.