In this talk, writer Daniel Saldaña París explores the diary as a literary form — not simply as private testimony, but as a fertile ground for fiction, transformation, and the instability of the self. Drawing on his years of reading and teaching about diaries, as well as his own writing practice, Saldaña París reflects on how this genre resists narrative closure and allows for shifts in identity, voice, and desire.
Referencing writers such as Alejandra Pizarnik, Franz Kafka, John Cheever, Helen Garner, and Susan Sontag — alongside philosophical frameworks like Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another — Saldaña París examines the diary as a space of intimacy, distinct from both privacy and fixed identity. He considers how the diary enables a form of self-address in which the “I” becomes another, creating conditions for fiction to emerge through fragmentation, oscillation, and repetition.
Blending literary theory with personal insight, the talk reflects on what diaries can teach us about writing both fiction and literary non-fiction, focusing on what returns, what hides, what resists interpretation, rather than what concludes, as a way of uncovering the structural and emotional core of the text.
Daniel Saldaña París is the author of four novels—Among Strange Victims, Ramifications, The Dance and the Fire, and My Father’s Names—as well as a collection of personal essays, Planes Flying Over a Monster. His work has been translated into multiple languages and earned him a place in Bogotá39, a selection of the best Latin American writers under 40. He has received numerous fellowships and residencies, including from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires, Art Omi, MacDowell, and the Jan Michalski Foundation. He was also awarded the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writers Award in the UK and was a finalist for the Herralde Prize in 2021. In 2022, he was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and he is currently a Fellow at the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts.
This event is colloquium credit eligible. Register here.