Guillermo Verdecchia is primarily known for his award-winning plays; Citizen Suárez is his first book of short stories, and it is a remarkable debut.
These stories take on the quintessential issues forced upon a generation betrayed by their citizenship—a betrayal the more profound because it subsists primarily in the global death of the nation-state. These are stories about people travelling, wandering or lost between countries and languages—people caught between the impulse to flee and the desire to belong. Sex, geography and politics grip the protagonists of these pieces, demanding promises, compromises and resolutions. These are stories about power—personal, civic, sexual, filial, political—and how, lubricious, it slips between the fingers. Quiet, careful, witty, they document and celebrate survival—consolations, complicities and accommodations in the face of indifference, cruelty and fear. The characters of these stories are known to the reader, intimately known, because they are revealed to us in the way that only we know ourselves—in those darkest recesses of the desires and fears we imagine, we hide from others, and thus, also from those we love. Most astonishing of all for a writer venturing into a new genre for the first time is the elegant surety of his style—Verdecchia speaks in these stories with the fatalistic lyricism of Lorca, the philosophical ambiguity of Paz, and the emotional scalpel of Márquez.

Guillermo Verdecchia is a writer of drama, fiction, and film; a director, dramaturge, actor, and translator whose work has been seen and heard on stages, screens, and radios across the country and around the globe. The author, or co-author, of, among other works, The Noam Chomsky Lectures and Insomnia (with Daniel Brooks); Fronteras Americanas, The Terrible but Incomplete Journals of John D., bloom; A Line in the Sand (with Marcus Youssef), and the controversial Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axes of Evil (with Camyar Chai and Marcus Youssef). He is a recipient of the Governor General’s AWard for Drama, a four-time winner of the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, a recipient of Dora and Jessie Awards, and sundry film festival awards for his film Crucero/Crossroads, based on Fronteras Americanas and made with Ramiro Puerta.

He lives in Toronto with Tamsin Kelsey, his partner of many years, and their two children.


Awards and Recognition*
Chalmers Canadian Play Award (1997) A Line the Sand with Marcus Youssef
Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards, Community Recognition Award (1994)
Chalmers Canadian Play Award (1994) Fronteras Americanas
Governor General’s Award for Drama (1993) Fronteras Americanas
Governor General’s Award for Drama, Finalist (1992) The Noam Chomsky Lectures with Daniel Brooks
Chalmers Canadian Play Award (1992) The Noam Chomsky Lectures with Daniel Brooks
Chalmers Canadian Play Award (1990) i.d.

Guillermo Verdecchia's profile page