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BIOGRAPHY

Joe Broderick

The Keening: Translator. Native of Melbourne (Australia), has lived the best part of forty years in Latin America (since 1969, mostly in Colombia) as a freelance writer and illustrator, publishing dozens of booklets and educational comic strips for a variety of non-governmental organizations and also for state and semi-state bodies. He also worked as editor (establishing his own small publishing company, El Labrador) and as translator. His biography of Camilo Torres (1928–1966) has gone into five separate editions in the course of the 1980s and 1990s; a sixth edition has just been released (Ed. Intermedio, Bogotá 2005). Other works include El Guerrillero Invisible, a biography of the Spanish priest Manuel Pérez, who became a guerrilla fighter in the late 1960s and who, on his death in early 1998, was leader of the so-called National Liberation Army (it has been rewritten in English by the author with the title The Silent Guerrilla); Fall From Grace, a biography of Eamonn Casey, bishop of Galway; El Imperio de Cartón, an exposé on questionable methods used by a foreign company to exploit human and natural resources and the complicity of politicians and Colombian government officials. A prime-time documentary on the book's content went to air on Colombian television in late 1998. Other work includes a television project for the Australia Broadcasting Commission: a four-part mini-series, Edge of the Cold, directed by David Parer. Broderick also spent several years in Dublin, where he worked on the weekly magazine Hibernia, publishing book reviews, articles, and cartoons; and as writer, journalist, and illustrator for different media. Translations: Walt Whitman's Song of Myself; a bilingual edition of Broderick's anthology of Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney's poetry, David Mamet's Oleanna, Harvey Ferstein's Untidy Endings, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Harold Pinter's The Lover, for Colombia's National Theater/Teatro Nacional. Broderick's Samuel Beckett, La Tragicomedia de la Vida (a biography of the Irish playwright and author and an introduction to his work for a Spanish-language readership) will be published shortly in Bogotá by Panamericana Ltd.

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