Rosario Tijeras

"Since they shot her at point-blank range while she was being kissed, she confused the pain of love with that of death." Rosario Tijeras is the violent, violated character at the center of Jorge Franco's study of contrasts, set in self-destructing 1980s Medellín. Her very name-evoking the rosary, and scissors-bespeaks her conflict as a woman who becomes a contract killer to insulate herself from the random violence of the streets. Then she is shot, gravely wounded, and the circle of contradiction is closed.
From the corridors of the hospital where Rosario is fighting for her life, Antonio, the narrator, waits to learn if she will recover. Through him, we reconstruct the friendship between the two, her love story with Emilio, and her life as a hitwoman.
Rosario Tijeras has been recognized as an admirable continuation of a literary subject that was first treated by Gabriel García Márquez and then by Fernando Vallejo. A work in the Latin American social realist tradition, Rosario Tijeras is told in fast and vibrant prose and with poetic flourish.

Born in Medellín, Colombia, in 1962, JORGE FRANCO studied film at the London International Film School and Literature at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. He began his career as a writer in 1991 and was awarded the Pedro Gómez Valderrama National Narrative prize for a collection of short stories entitled Maldito amor. His first novel, Mala Noche, won the Ciudad de Pereira National Novel Competition. Franco is considered one of the youngest writers of note in Latin America, and one who has already earned a prominent place alongside several world-renowned Colombian writers.