Juan Gabriel Vásquez (born 1973) is a Colombian writer, journalist and translator. He has written many novels, short stories, literary essays, and numerous articles of political commentary.

His novel The Sound of Things Falling, published in Spanish in 2011, won the Alfaguara Novel Prize and the 2014 International Dublin Literary Award, among other prizes. His novels have been published in 28 languages. In 2012, after living in Europe for sixteen years, in Paris, the Belgian Ardennes, and Barcelona, Vásquez moved with his family back to Bogotá.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973, to Alfredo Vásquez and Fanny Velandia, both lawyers. He began to write at an early age, publishing his first stories in a school magazine at the age of eight. During his teenage years, he began reading the Latin American writers of the boom generation: Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, among others.

In 1990, Vásquez began studying Law at the Universidad del Rosario. The university is located in downtown Bogotá, surrounded by the streets and historical sites where Vásquez’s novels are set. While studying for his law degree, he voraciously read Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, among other Latin American authors, and studied the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. He graduated in 1996 with a thesis entitled Revenge as a legal prototype in the Iliad, later published by his alma mater. By the time he received his diploma, he had already decided to pursue a career as a writer.

Days after receiving his diploma, Vásquez traveled to Paris for post-graduate studies in Latin American literature at La Sorbonne, which he never finished. He had literary reasons for choosing Paris, as Vásquez associated the city with the works of expatriate authors who had influenced him: Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and James Joyce. But he also left Colombia because of the political violence and climate of fear that prevailed in the country since the 1980s.

In Paris, Vásquez finished his first novel, Persona (1997). A short novel set in Florence, it shows the influence of modernism and of Virginia Woolf, an author to whose work Vásquez has always felt close. After his studies at the Sorbonne, Vásquez abandoned writing a thesis in order to concentrate on fiction. He finished a second novel, Alina suplicante in 1999.

Vásquez later repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction with his first two books, which he thought of as the works of an apprentice. He has refused to reissue them after their initial publication. Both are short novels with an intimate atmosphere, but otherwise have little in common. Vásquez has said that even before publishing Alina suplicante, his dissatisfaction with these works pitched him into a deep crisis. He left Paris at the beginning of 1999, looking for a place to renew himself.

1999 was a crucial year for Vasquez, both professionally and personally. Between January and September, Vásquez lived near Xhoris, a small town in the Walloon area of Belgium in the home of an older couple in the Ardennes. He has frequently stressed the importance of this period.