Leonardo Garnier

I was born in 1955 in San José in Costa Rica. When I was a boy, besides playing and watching television, I loved to read. I can still remember how my dad would come home with a new book or a stack of comic books. He would always slip a copy of the Epics, Classic Myths, or Great Lives in between the Supermans, Batmans and Donald Ducks. And so I kept on reading, and I kept on growing. In school I devoured books; my favorites were Jules Verne and Emilio Salgari. Of course I also played soccer with my friends (although I wasn't very good at it) and we went on outings to the country and to the beach. By the time I got to university, where I studied economy, my tastes in reading had evolved to García Márquez and Vargas Llosa (but don't mention those two authors too close together; they wouldn't get along very well!), Fuentes, Neruda, and most of all, Cortázar, with his stories and his Cronopios.

As time went by, I grew up, and when I was all grown up I married María Marta. I had known her since I was fifteen, but nothing came of it until... but that is another story, and the point is that our daughters Marie and Isabel were born. We have been reading them loads of stories ever since they were little. Sometimes we would make up stories together. That was where the story of Howler Monkey and Tubby Lion came from. It was my first story book, and it was how I discovered that I could be not only a reader and an economist, but also a writer!