Octavio Escobar Giraldo was born in Manizales, Colombia, in 1962. He is a professor of Literature at the University of Caldas. In 1995 he published the novels Saide (Colombian Black Chronicle Award) and The Last Diary of Tony Flowers; in 2003 Mónica Pont's album (winner of the VIII José Eustasio Rivera National Biennial of Novels); and this same year, just a few months ago, 1851. Folleto de Cabo Roto, which has made him one of the most popular authors of the moment in his country.
Escobar Giraldo was already a cult author thanks to his short books De slight music (1998; National Prize of the Ministry of Culture) and Hotel en Shangri-Lá (2002), whose characters are part of a narrative project in which the de Saide, and that it constitutes one of the fiercest, lyrical and correct portraits of Colombian society at the turn of the century: a black chronicle of, as Philip Potdevin has pointed out, «the problem of multiculturalism, political violence, drug trafficking and the struggle for a space within the social stratification ", which has also made Juan Carlos Garay write in El malpensante:" The formula is original and the results are brilliant ".