When he was three years old, he arrived in Chile with his American father and Argentine mother; at seven they moved to Asunción, Paraguay, and finally settled in Buenos Aires, where Wilson would attend some primary school and receive all of his secondary education.

[2] The family returned to the United States after his father became a diplomat during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, and Wilson entered Cornell University in New York, where he studied Hispanic Literature and met Edmundo Paz Soldán.

"[5] Five years later El púgil was released,[5] a text in which "the references range from the work and life of Roberto Arlt to the aesthetics of Blade Runner, and from the classic trans-Andean comic book The Eternaut to the voice of Orson Welles reading The War of the Worlds."

Journalist Alberto Rojas described it as "a terrifying trip to those places away from the big American cities that Wilson knows well, where men and women live in search of their broken dreams, in the midst of nights that seem never to end.

"[8] In Letras Libres, Mauricio Montiel [es] wrote that "the best of contemporary Latin American narrative is brewing away from the center and near the periphery," and that a good example of this thesis are these two novels by "Wilson, rara avis that has decided to return to the bustle of the downtown – read literary – establishment to face the apparent suburban stillness with a look full of concern, and I say and emphasize 'apparent', because in the powerful suburban diptych composed of Zombie and Rockabilly [...] that peace goes on to reveal a substratum of contained violence that ends up emerging in unsuspected and openly disturbing ways.

The author "resigned to a position of privilege in the national literary medium," and ended his link with agent Guillermo Schavelzon and Alfaguara to publish his novel with a small Chilean label, Orjikh.