The time he spent there provided the author with the material to write his most famous and viscerally haunting novella, Boarding Home (known in English as The Halfway House).
He was the winner of the prestigious 1987 "Letras de Oros" (Golden Letters) contest, judged by the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz.
In 2013, the Cuban writers Elizabeth Mirabal and Carlos Velazco published the book "Talking about Guillermo Rosales" (Editorial Silueta).
Boarding Home was translated into English by Anna Kushner as The Halfway House and published by New Directions in 2009, featuring a preface by Jose Manuel Prieto.
Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) praised it as a "frightening, nihilistic cousin of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest".