In 2012, after living in Europe for sixteen years, in Paris, the Belgian Ardennes, and Barcelona, Vásquez moved with his family back to Bogotá.

During his teenage years, he began reading the Latin American writers of the boom generation: Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, among others.

Days after receiving his diploma, Vásquez traveled to Paris for post-graduate studies in Latin American literature at La Sorbonne, which he never finished.

He had literary reasons for choosing Paris, as Vásquez associated the city with the works of expatriate authors who had influenced him: Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and James Joyce.

A short novel set in Florence, it shows the influence of modernism and of Virginia Woolf, an author to whose work Vásquez has always felt close.

Between January and September, Vásquez lived near Xhoris, a small town in the Walloon area of Belgium in the home of an older couple in the Ardennes.

[3] His short story "The Messenger" was included in Líneas Aéreas, an anthology that would be regarded as the main forecast of Spanish and Latin American literature in the 21st century.

Under the direction of a Hungarian expatriate, Mihály Dés, the magazine brought together a generation of emerging writers such as French novelist Mathias Énard and Catalan cultural critic Jordi Carrión.

While working at Lateral, Vásquez wrote a series of short stories based on his experiences during the years he spent in France and Belgium.

Lovers on All Saints’ Day was published in Colombia in April 2001; although it was well received, evoking comparisons to Raymond Carver and Jorge Luis Borges, critics were surprised by the fact that a Colombian author should write a book with Belgian or French characters.

[5] The few reviews that appeared in Spain praised the "subtleties of a Central European narrator"[6] and discussed the simultaneous influence of Borges and Hemingway.

He establishes a dialogue with the life and work of Conrad, in particular his novel Nostromo, and with the Colombian history of the 19th century, especially the building of the Panama Canal.

His narrator has a picaresque and sarcastic tone, constantly addressing the reader, having recourse to anachronisms, exaggerations, and improbability whenever it suits his yarn.

According to Spanish novelists Juan Marsé and Enrique Vila-Matas, Vásquez creates a powerful dialogue between the narrator and the reader, as well as between fiction and history.

In one of his articles he wrote:That right to mix traditions and languages with impunity - to unapologetically look for contamination, to break with the staggered national or linguistic loyalties that tormented Colombian writers until recently - is, perhaps, the great legacy of García Márquez … One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that can be admired infinitely, but whose teachings are hardly applicable (the proof is what happens to its copycats).

[11]In 2007, Vásquez was included in Bogotá 39, a Hay Festival project that brought together the most notable Latin American writers under 39 years of age.

His political positions seem to defend freedom as a supreme value and an open, secular and liberal society:For me it is still relevant for a novelist to participate in the social debate.

In Italy, it won the Premio Gregor von Rezzori-Città di Firenze; with the English translation, Vásquez became the first Latin American and the second Spanish-language author to win the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

In El País (Madrid) and The Guardian (London), he repeatedly defended the peace process and the need to put an end to the war that has ravaged his country during the last decades.

Or rather: the one that was able to put everything together in the same plot[19].With the novel, Vásquez became the first Latin American to win the Premio Casino da Póvoa, Portugal’s most prestigious award for fiction in translation.

In The New York Review of Books, Ariel Dorfman wrote:Juan Gabriel Vásquez … has succeeded García Márquez as the literary grandmaster of Colombia, a country that can boast of many eminent authors … Readers might expect that Vásquez has written a noir detective novel that investigates a crime that has gone unpunished for seventy years and restores some semblance of justice.

The result of these courses was a collection of essays around the art of the novel: Travels with a Blank Map (Viajes con un mapa en blanco in Spanish).

In 2018, 17 years after Lovers on All Saint's Day, Vásquez published his second collection of short stories, Songs for the Flames (Canciones para el incendio in Spanish).