Biography

Patricia Paola Fernández Silanes (born 23 June 1971), better known as Nona Fernández, is a Chilean actress, author, and screenwriter. She is a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, and the Altazor prize (on many occasions). An only child of a single mother, Nona Fernández grew up in a Matta Avenue neighborhood close to the market Persa Bíobío. There she had her first job, selling second-hand clothes.Even though her name is the same as her mother's, Patricia Paola, everyone calls her Nona, the name by which she also signs her works. When she was just starting to walk, she used to talk little, hardly saying anything. All she could say was 'no'. Turning this negative into her child's pet word earned her the peculiar nickname "Nonito" among her family. When she got older, the nickname became Nona.She attended Santa Cruz School in Santiago and later the Catholic University Theater School.

Later, as an actress, she founded the company Merri Melodys, participated in productions of many theatrical works, and won a competition of the Centro Chileno-Norteamericano de Cultura as the best actress.In 1995, she participated in a workshop given by Antonio Skármeta, the same year she won the Gabriela Mistral Literary Games. Her stories were first published in various anthologies of contests, and her first book of short stories, El Cielo, was published in 2000. Her award-winning novel Mapocho was published two years later.

Regarding the genesis of that first novel, she states:

I wrote my first novel in an apartment in Barcelona, staring at Chile from afar, filling pages with wild interpretations of its national history, while my belly grew with a child seeking space. At the same time I gave birth to my son I finished the book. The name of my son is Dante. The book was named Mapocho, like the river that crosses my city, the same one that has moved garbage and corpses since always.

Fernández has been included by some critics in the so-called Literatura de los hijos.

Her husband, Dante's father, is the writer and theatre director Marcelo Leonart, whom she met when they were both studying at the Theatre School. Together they run the company La Fusa.

Nona describes herself with these words: "Actress for fun. Narrator for being a nuisance, trying not to forget what should not be forgotten. Scriptwriter for soap operas because of necessity. An uncomfortable Chilean, and sometimes rabid".

Her work as a screenwriter for TV series is for Nona Fernández only a way to make a living. On TVN, she has become the scriptwriter for El laberinto de Alicia. Also, she contributes to the series Los archivos del cardenal, based on the cases defended by the Vicariate of Solidarity during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. She also co-wrote Andrés Waissbluth's film 199 recetas para ser feliz (199 Tips to be Happy) and the documentary La ciudad de los fotógrafos (City of Photographers) by Sebastián Moreno.

She was selected in 2011 along with two other Chileans: Diego Muñoz Valenzuela and Francisco Díaz Klaassen as one of the "25 literary treasures waiting to be discovered", writers "whose talent has been consolidated in their countries, but who are still not well known outside them", by the Guadalajara International Book Fair in celebration of its 25 years of existence.She made her debut as a playwright in 2012, with El taller, a play inspired by the literary salon that Mariana Callejas held in her home in Lo Curro while her husband, Michael Townley, directed the underground operations of a DINA headquarters. This black comedy performed by Leonart and Fernández's company, La Fusa, premiered in April at the Santiago theater Lastarria 90 and re-shown in August at the Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral. It won the Premio Altazor 2013 in the Theater art category. Her second piece, Liceo de niñas, premiered in 2015 (with this, the company led by Nona and Leonart is now called Pieza Oscura); it is "a fantastic comedy about an overwhelmed science teacher who discovers in his school's laboratory three students who have been hidden since a 1985 protest occupation."