Joseph Zárate

Joseph Zárate (Lima, 1986) is a Peruvian journalist and editor. He received the 2018 Gabriel García Márquez Award in the Text category, the 2016 Ortega y Gasset Award for Best Story or Investigative Journalism, and the 2015 PAGE National Award for Environmental Journalism created by the UN. He was deputy editor of the magazines Etiqueta Negra and Etiqueta Verde, editor at IDL-Reporteros, editor in residence at Radio Ambulante and communications director of the Vist Projects foundation.

He has collaborated with various media such as The New York Times (United States), Courrier International (France), Internazionale (Italy), Granta en Español, El País, Revista 5W (Spain), Agencia Pública, Sumauma (Brazil), GK (Ecuador) and Ojo Público (Peru). His work has been included in the collective books Rabia. Crónicas contra el cínismo en América Latina (Anagrama, 2022), Untold Microcosms: Latin American Writers in the British Museum (Charco Press, 2022), Un mundo lleno de futuro (BID-Planeta, 2017), Eduardo Galeano, un ilegal en el paraíso (Siglo XXI, 2016), Ciudades visibles (RM, 2016), Latinoamérica se mueve (Hivos, 2016), and ¡Atención! (Czernin, 2015), an anthology that brings together ten reports by Latin American authors published in Germany.

He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Social Communication from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in 2007. He holds a MFA in Literary Creation from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and received the 2018 Ochberg Fellowship from the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. He was a professor of Literary Journalism at the Peruvian University of Applied Sciences, and currently teaches nonfiction workshops independently.

 Zárate is the author of Guerras del interior (Debate, 2018), a non-fiction book about socio-environmental conflicts caused by the exploitation of gold, wood and oil in the Andes and the Amazon of Peru, and which has been translated into Italian, Polish, Norwegian, French, Chinese and English (this translation, published by Granta Books, won the Valle Inclán 2022 Award). For his chronicles on funeral work during the Covid-19 pandemic in his country, collected in his non-fiction book Algo nuestro sobre la tierra (Literatura Random House, 2021), he received a Special Mention in the National Literature Award 2022 in the Non-Fiction category, won the National Journalism Award 2020, and was nominated for the True Story Award 2020/21, which recognizes the best narrative journalism published around the world.