Hernán Casciari

One of his answers serves as a kind of X-ray. He was asked when he decided to dedicate himself to this and replied that there had never been a decision: he started when he was very young and “I do not remember ever having done anything else.” It is not the statement of someone who chose a vocation. It is the statement of someone who never knew how to separate himself from it.

A small-town boy with a press credential

He was born in Mercedes, Buenos Aires Province, on March 16, 1971, and lived there until he was eighteen: father, mother, sister and a small dog. At thirteen, he got his first job covering basketball games for the newspaper El Oeste.

At nineteen, he founded and edited a local magazine, La Ventana, where he did something he now admits without embarrassment: he invented stories using his own neighbours as characters, mixing fact and fiction simply for the pleasure of playing with them. The joke ended in legal trouble, and the magazine closed after two and a half years. He later founded the newspaper El Domingo, which also lasted only a short time. At that stage, his passion still did not know where to settle.

In the 1990s, he moved to Buenos Aires and worked in the media, particularly in financial journalism. Between 1998 and 1999, he did something that sounds like a desperate gamble but was actually a form of discipline: he submitted short stories to competitions in Europe and the United States and lived on whatever prize money he won. It worked well enough. One of those awards took him to Paris in 2000, where he met Cristina, a Catalan woman, and eventually spent fifteen years living in Barcelona.

The obsession finds its format

In Spain, he founded a media-monitoring company and, at the same time, opened a blog. That hobby produced Mirta Bertotti, a fictional housewife from Mercedes who wrote her private diary online and whom many readers believed to be real. In 2005, the blog won Deutsche Welle’s award for the best blog in the world and was later turned into the novel Más respeto que soy tu madre, translated into French and Italian.

Other experiments followed in which fiction disguised itself as reality: a fabricated diary by Letizia Ortiz and a mentally ill character who wrote on the website of El País, supported by a false news story published by the newspaper itself. Antonio Gasalla later arrived with the theatrical adaptation of Mirta, which premiered in 2009 and brought Casciari fame and money.

Giving everything up when everything is going well

In 2010, at the height of his success, he walked away. He publicly left four major publishing houses and the newspapers El País and La Nación, and founded Orsai magazine with Chiri Basilis, his childhood friend: no advertising, no intermediaries and worldwide distribution. The first issue, published in January 2011, sold 10,080 copies.

That is the trait that gives shape to everything that followed. His passion is not only writing: it is building the entire circuit so the story can reach its audience without tolls. His own publishing house, his own magazine, his own production company and his own school of narrative. He explains it without grand gestures: “What works for me financially is having fun,” and when communication feels forced, he says, it does not work.

The heart attack as permission

On December 6, 2015, he suffered a heart attack in Montevideo. Doctors temporarily banned him from taking intercontinental flights, and he took advantage of it: he had wanted to return to Argentina for some time but had not found an excuse. He stayed on this side of the Atlantic. Soon after arriving, he was invited to contribute a column to Perros de la Calle, and since then he has read his stories on major radio programmes, television and theatre stages.

That night also produced a book, El mejor infarto de mi vida, and, in 2025, a television series. Once again, passion transformed what happened to his body into material.

The family on stage

In 2016, he organised a performance to celebrate his return, with his mother, sister and other relatives. He enjoyed it, they repeated it from time to time, and it eventually reached Corrientes Avenue with its own theatre marquee. His mother, Chichita, is the heart of those shows. She wanted to become an actress as a child, but her father would not allow it, so she is now fulfilling that wish. Her son describes the situation in the opposite way one might expect: she has to be persuaded to come off the stage, not to go on it.

Humour is the other inherited material. He says he could not even sit down at the keyboard without it and attributes it to his father, who was entertaining in small gatherings and shy in larger ones. His childhood in the town is his favourite source of material: “Childhood is a very absorbent system of memories,” in which personal experience can no longer be distinguished from something once told by an aunt.

When passion becomes uncomfortable

In December 2023, he said on a streaming channel, “I do not believe in literature,” and social media tore him apart. He was called a mercenary, a cynic and a demagogue. His argument was less scandalous than the headline: five-hundred-page novels belong to an age without fourteen different devices competing for people’s attention. His response was consistent with his character: he cut the price of all his printed books in half until people stopped insulting him.

Anyone who accuses him of not caring about books must explain why he has published more than twenty of them, runs a publishing house on his own, maintains a narrative school and makes films financed by thousands of partners who contribute money without knowing him personally. For La uruguaya, based on the novel by Pedro Mairal, he issued 6,000 bonds worth one hundred dollars each and raised the 600,000 dollars needed to make the film. It was completed. Muchachos, Canelones and the others followed.

At fifty-five, he is still doing the same thing he did at thirteen: telling a story and waiting for someone on the other side to become hooked.