[2] An only child of a single mother, Nona Fernández grew up in a Matta Avenue neighborhood close to the market Persa Bíobío.

Regarding the genesis of that first novel, she states: I wrote my first novel in an apartment in Barcelona, staring at Chile from afar, filling pages with wild interpretations of its national history, while my belly grew with a child seeking space.

Also, she contributes to the series Los archivos del cardenal, based on the cases defended by the Vicariate of Solidarity during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

[1] She also co-wrote Andrés Waissbluth [es]'s film 199 recetas para ser feliz (199 Tips to be Happy) and the documentary La ciudad de los fotógrafos (City of Photographers) by Sebastián Moreno.

She was selected in 2011 along with two other Chileans: Diego Muñoz Valenzuela and Francisco Díaz Klaassen [es] as one of the "25 literary treasures waiting to be discovered", writers "whose talent has been consolidated in their countries, but who are still not well known outside them", by the Guadalajara International Book Fair in celebration of its 25 years of existence.

[5][6] She made her debut as a playwright in 2012, with El taller, a play inspired by the literary salon that Mariana Callejas held in her home in Lo Curro while her husband, Michael Townley, directed the underground operations of a DINA headquarters.

[7] This black comedy performed by Leonart and Fernández's company, La Fusa, premiered in April at the Santiago theater Lastarria 90 and re-shown in August at the Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral.

[9] Her second piece, Liceo de niñas, premiered in 2015 (with this, the company led by Nona and Leonart is now called Pieza Oscura);[10] it is "a fantastic comedy about an overwhelmed science teacher who discovers in his school's laboratory three students who have been hidden since a 1985 protest occupation.

"I want to speak", he says, and a journalist turns on her voice recorder to listen to a testimony that opens the doors to a hitherto unknown dimension.