About the Author of 'Cuando florece el macano'
Machine translation from the original, not yet reviewed by the author.
Original in Spanish
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
(1993 Biography)
Roberto Joaquín Pérez 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 is currently in the sixth year at the prestigious José Daniel Crespo High School, which he has 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.
He was recently awarded three Honorable Mentions in the Carlos Endara Photography Contest.
Cuando Florece el Macano (When the Macano Blooms) is his first published work.