About the Author of 'Confesiones en el cautiverio'

Roberto Pérez-Franco was born on April 26, 1976, in Chitré, Panama, and grew up in the neighboring Heroica Villa de Los Santos. His main artistic contribution has been in literature. A writer since adolescence, he published five short-story collections between 1993 and 2008, which have earned various honors, including the José María Sánchez National Short Story Award in 2005. His work appears in many anthologies and literary magazines, in Panama and abroad. Besides the short story, he writes verse and short essay. A 1993 graduate of the José Daniel Crespo High School in Chitré, which later created a Readers’ Circle in his name, he completed a degree in Electromechanical Engineering at the Technological University of Panama in 2001, as a member of the Honor Chapter. On a Fulbright scholarship, he completed a master’s degree in 2004 and a doctorate in 2010, both at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he later worked until 2017. Versatile and restless, he has presented ideas in fields as diverse as the symbolic simulation of electrical circuits, archaeoastronomy, and folklore. His passions include literature, painting, music, chess, kayaking, and Esperanto. After twelve years in Boston, he moved to Melbourne, Australia, in 2017, where he lives with his wife and his son.

More information at: www.roberto.au

(1995 Biography)

Roberto Joaquin Perez-Franco was born on April 26, 1976, in the city of Chitré. The son of parents from Los Santos, he has lived all his life in the Heroica Villa de Los Santos.

He completed his primary studies at the Bilingual Psychopedagogical School, graduating with honors. He attended secondary school at the prestigious Jose Daniel Crespo High School, which he successfully represented in the First Panamanian Physics Olympiad, taking the highest place among the public secondary schools; and in the Photography Contest of the American Chamber of Commerce, where he won second place, among university students. He studied English as a Second Language at Louisiana State University.

He has been awarded three Honorable Mentions in the Carlos Endara Photography Contest, and one in the Imágenes Contest of the National Institute of Culture.

At seventeen, he published his first work, Cuando florece el macano (When the Macano Blooms), registered, evaluated, and approved by the Ministry of Education as a reading text for the Second Cycle.

He is currently in the first year of Electromechanical Engineering at the Technological University of Panama, for which he has proposed and designed the construction of a sundial.

At nineteen, Confesiones en el cautiverio (Confessions in Captivity) is his second published work.