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This article examines the relationship between writing and violence in novels by two of the most prominent contemporary Colombian authors, Tomás González and Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Writing in the context of the aftermath of over half a century of armed conflict, both authors contribute to the understanding of the country’s cultural legacy of violence by engaging, each in his own way, with the weight that the lettered tradition has historically carried in Colombia. Vásquez’s work reflects an embrace of writing and the literary as a limited but construc-tive medium to process trauma and weave stories to make sense of Colombians’ individual and collective shared histories of violence. González’s characters, on the other hand, deliberately veer away from the lettered tradition, trying—para-doxically through the written word itself—to imagine worlds not shaped by the inherently violent act of capturing reality in words.
