Valerie Miles has spent her life following literature across languages and forms. Based in Barcelona, she founded Granta en español in 2003, and serves as Literary Advisor to the Prado Museum, where she edits the Writing the Prado series and chairs the selection committee of its International Fellowship for writers. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Pompeu Fabra University based on years of research in Roberto Bolaño's private archive, culminating in the exhibition Archivo Bolaño 1977–2003, the first drawn from the writer's papers. She has edited several of his posthumous works. Miles is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and serves on the editorial board of Yale University Press. Her book A Thousand Forests in One Acorn gathers conversations with some of the world's leading writers. Her bibliography also includes twenty-six editions of Granta en español, among them a recent volume dedicated to Peru. As both a creative and critical writer, her fiction, essays, criticism, and translations have appeared widely in the international press and have received numerous awards and distinctions, including the 2026 BBK Gutun Zuria Lifetime Achievement Award. Together with Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, she has selected, translated, and introduced the poetry of Mariano Melgar in a forthcoming book that brings the work of a foundational figure in Peruvian poetry to English-language readers for the first time.
Photo: © Nina Subin