Juan Pablo Villalobos is a Mexican writer and entrepreneur. He is the author of Down the Rabbit Hole (And Other Stories, 2011), which was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2011, and Quesadillas (And Other Stories, 2013).
Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He lived in Barcelona, Spain for eight years, before moving to Brazil.
He studied marketing and Spanish literature. He has worked in market research and published travel stories, as well as literary and film criticism. Villalobos has researched the influence of the avant-garde on the work of César Aira, and the flexibility of pipelines for electrical installations.
Villalobos's first book, Fiesta en la madriguera, has been translated into Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Romanian, Dutch and English. Its English translation, Down the Rabbit Hole by Rosalind Harvey, was published in September 2011 by the London publishing house And Other Stories. Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award.
His second novel, Quesadillas, is also translated by Rosalind Harvey and is set to be published by And Other Stories in 2013.
Villalobos has said that his first book was inspired by Nellie Campobello's collection of short stories set during the Mexican revolution, titled Cartridge.
In Germany, Villalobos is recognized as an important representative of the so-called 'narco-literature'. His book Fiesta en la madriguera has been called "a disillusioned domestic tale from the dark heartland of Latin American machismo"
Down the Rabbit Hole, by Juan Pablo Villalobos, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2011 and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2012.
Tochtli lives in a palace. He loves hats, samurai, guillotines and dictionaries, and what he wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is a child whose father is a drug baron on the verge of taking over a powerful cartel, and Tochtli is growing up in a luxury hideout that he shares with hit men, prostitutes, dealers, servants and the odd corrupt politician or two.
Down the Rabbit Hole, a masterful and darkly comic first novel, is the chronicle of a delirious journey to grant a child’s wish.
