Alejandra Costamagna Crivelli is a Chilean writer and journalist. She was born in 1970 in Santiago, to Argentine parents who arrived in Chile in 1967 fleeing the dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía. She is the author of four novels and five collections of short stories. Although she has continued to write novels, Costamagna has developed the short story, so much so that she even reconverted her first novel into a short story, Había una vez un pájaro (Once upon a Time There Was a Bird), which appeared in 2013 in a book by the same title, accompanied by two other texts. Her first approach to writing was through the diaries that she began to write irregularly from the age of ten, but it was in adolescence that Costamagna began to take writing more seriously, after entering Francisco Miranda School. She studied journalism at the Diego Portales University and attended the workshops of Guillermo Blanco, Pía Barros, Carlos Cerda, and Antonio Skármeta. Later she completed a master’s degree in literature. In a 2010 interview for Paula magazine, when asked: “Are you the kind of person who would legalize marijuana?” Costamagna responded: “And the morning-after pill and gay marriage and abortion and euthanasia too.” She was editor of the cultural section of La Nación newspaper and created the youth supplement La X. She worked on the Rock & Pop channel, taught literary workshops, worked as a theater commentator in national newspapers and magazines, and as a reporter and a columnist for several magazines. She has written for magazines such as Gatopardo, Rolling Stone, and El Malpensante. Her work has appeared in different anthologies and been translated into Italian, French, Danish, and Korean. Costamagna has been honored with several awards, including Altazor (2006) and Anna Seghers (Germany, 2008) for the best Latin American author of the year.
