Panamanian horror poet and novelist

Passionate about literature, history, philosophy, terrorism, cinema, reading and discovering new sciences and technologies, this is Rolando Santamaría, a Panamanian romantic poet and horror novelist.

His love for literature says it’s something like the butterfly effect, “if you gave Roland a book in 2016, he’d probably look at you with a strange face,” said the biomedical engineering student.

However, the moment changed when, in 2017, the Spanish teacher “asked us to write a a song of at least two stanzas, and at that moment I was so unconsciously inspired that I ended up writing a longer one. Since then, things have happened and I realized that I love to write Songs and unpublished poems, until one day in 2018, my mother gave me the literary novel “El Asilo Santo” by Miguel Esteban Gonzáles, and with that book I enchanted the world of horror literature.

“Thanks to that work, I really realized how passionate I am about reading horror and that it was even one of my impulses to want to write a book“, he said exclusively to Panama America.

Last May, he saw the light of his first literary work called “Shadows of Redemption”.

Is horror novel with a dose of youthful drama that tells the story of Aiden Youngblood, an agnostic teenager from a Christian family who, desperate to forget the trauma of his ex-girlfriend’s death, starts using a strange drug, not even realizing that it will cause the greatest pandemonium. the darkness of his life, opening the door paranormal eventstragedies in his family and the path to a dark secret in his lineage.

“This work is actually the product of two things: First, the inspiration that came to me while listening to the song ‘The Great Pandemonium’ from the band Kamelot, and secondly, how inspired I felt after reading Miguel Esteban González, he is literally one of my writers favourites, and also one of the most influential in my style,” he said.

He promotes his works through social networks (Instagram and tiktok…) and with his editorial team “Writer’s Diary”who also promote their authors.

support

About how you perceive support for writers in the country, from yours experience and “to be honest, on a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a 5 and I’m being too generous.”

“I finished this book in 2019 and only now I was able to publish it precisely because of this, the lack of support and guidance,” he said.

He added: “Actually, I can count on one hand the people (outside of my family and circle of friends) who really helped me get started as a writer.”

“I think the situation with editorialsin Panama there are almost no publishing houses that are really and truly dedicated to supporting it new writers or beginners, the external people who reached me were specific cases, like Miguel Esteban Gonzáles and Yoselin Goncalves, Dr. Emilio Messina and the most notorious case of Theo Stamper, my editor, mentor and teacher,” he pointed out.