Camilo Marks is the son of Loreto Alonso, the sixth daughter of a Spanish communist deputy who "escaped the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and arrived in Chile in 1940 with his family after living in France.

He pursued a law degree at the University of Chile and took his exam before the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet against the government of Salvador Allende, but he did not graduate until 1975, after changing the subject of his thesis.

At the end of 1975, after working with the Comité Pro Paz [es] and the MIR, he left Chile for England, where he studied literature in London.

[1] After returning in the early 1980s, he was reinstated as a lawyer to defend victims of human rights violations by the military dictatorship, first with the Vicariate of Solidarity,[2] and after its dissolution, in the agencies that continued with this work: the Reparation and Reconciliation Corporation, the Human Rights Program of the Ministry of the Interior, and the Valech Commission.

Two years later, he compiled the Chilean short story anthology Grandes cuentos chilenos del siglo XX, and in 2004 published his second novel, Altiva música en la tormenta, which was also a finalist for the aforementioned award.