For Electric Literature, Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon recounts his unexpected turn to literature after returning to Guatemala in his early thirties, the paranoia and danger that accompanies being a writer amidst corruption, and leaving the country again after publishing his first novel:

I stumbled onto books, and then fell into writing. But something was finally starting to make sense, about myself, about my country. And now I was being warned by a crazy Salvadoran writer that I should leave.