Héctor Tobar
Héctor Tobar
Héctor Tobar is the Los Angeles-born author of seven books, including the memoir Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”, winner of the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the novels The Tattooed Soldier and The Last Great Road Bum. His non-fiction Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of Thirty-Three Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle that Set Them Free, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times bestseller; it was adapted into the film The 33. Tobar’s novel The Barbarian Nurseries was a New York Times Notable Book and won the California Book Award. His books have been translated into fifteen languages, including French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Mandarin. Tobar’s fiction has also appeared in Best American Short Stories.
Tobar earned his MFA in Fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and is currently a professor there. As a journalist, he was a foreign correspondent in Latin America and Iraq. He also was part of the Los Angeles Times team that earned the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News reporting. In addition, Tobar was an op-ed contributing editor for the New York Times. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and National Geographic. In 2020, he received a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard, where he wrote Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino.” In 2023, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants.
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WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
NAMED ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’ 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF TIME’S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2023 | A TOP TEN BOOK OF 2023 AT CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY
A new book by the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experie...Read More
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With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions. ...Read More
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In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times....Read More
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Deep Down Dark is the novel that inspired the film The 33 starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Cote de Pablo and Antonio Banderas.
When the San José mine collapsed outside of Copiapó, Chile, in August 2010, it trapped thirty-three miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking sixty-nine days. After the disaste...Read More
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Antonio Bernal is a Guatemalan refugee in Los Angeles haunted by memories of his wife and child, who were murdered at the hands of a man marked with yellow ink. In a park near Antonio's apartment, Guillermo Longoria extends his arm and reveals a sinister tattoo—yellow pelt, black spots, red mouth. It is the sign of the death squad, the Jaguar Bat...Read More
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Discussion About Latinx Culture and Race, Inequality, and Injustice
Moderated Discussion of Hector’s Books
“Holding On to a Middle-Class Home in a Burning Los Angeles”
“HÉCTOR TOBAR WINS THE 2024 ZÓCALO BOOK PRIZE”
Héctor Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls is the winner of the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.
Héctor Tobar named 2023 Guggenheim Fellow
“What’s a Latino? Héctor Tobar goes deep on stereotypes and solidarity”
Hector Tobar longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence for Our Migrant Souls.
Our Migrant Souls featured in best book of the year and book lists from major media outlets and retailers including: The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2023, NPR’s Books We Love 2023, Kirkus’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, Chicago Public Library’s Top Ten Books of 2023, Chicago Public Library’s Favorite Books of 2023, Powell’s Best Books of 2023: Nonfiction, Time Magazine’s The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023, Amazon’s Best Books of 2023, Amazon’s Top 20 Nonfiction Books of 2023, BookPage’s The Best Nonfiction of 2023, and in Nonfiction Category of Audible’s The Best of 2023 list.
“Our Migrant Souls was taught in dozens of classes both semesters and read by many hundreds of students. Many students have expressed how much Our Migrant Souls made them feel seen, something confirmed further by hearing Héctor’s lecture. We are especially happy that so many students were able to attend Héctor’s powerful talk in Laxson Auditorium to a packed crowd. I am incredibly grateful to Héctor for being so present with Chico State and Butte College students during his visit, and for his deeply important talk. I am grateful too for Our Migrant Souls – a book that not only provided a vital centering of Latinx voices on our campus and in our community, but provided many of us (students, faculty, staff, administrators, and community members) a much-needed sense of purpose during a period of anxiety and frustration. Being able to come together to think deeply about Our Migrant Souls has served as an important call to action.”
— Laura Nice, Lecturer, California State University Chico
Praise for Our Migrant Souls
“Easily his most personal book. . . Tobar uses his biography sparingly to illustrate larger aspects of Latino experience. He is as likely to quote historians and cultural theorists as he is to cite students, store clerks or an undocumented Trump supporter randomly encountered on the street. . . Tobar takes care to depict Latino life in a universal light, as something easily comprehensible to anyone who has ever felt the pull of a far-off person or place. . . There is power in the refrain of Tobar’s direct address, which gives his writing the feel of warm advice dispensed to youngsters grappling with a sense of self.”
— Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review“Eye-opening. . . Timely, intelligent, and generous, this is a must-read from Pulitzer Prize-winner Tobar.”
— Diego Báez, Booklist“Lyrical and uncompromising.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)Book This Speaker
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