Alejandro Ahumada

Biography

Alejandro has navigated his life between change and continuity, embarking on a journey that begins in the hills of Valparaíso, Chile, and continues through different corners of Europe, always with the sense of inhabiting several worlds at once. His story, shaped by resilience and wonder, unfolds through exile, adaptation and a constant search for meaning, guided by a trained eye for discovering the extraordinary within the everyday.

As a result of political persecution during the Pinochet dictatorship, his mother was forced into exile with him when he was just thirteen years old. The United Kingdom became both refuge and school of life, first in Scotland and later in Nottingham, where Alejandro absorbed languages, cultures and ways of seeing the world that would go on to shape his thinking and storytelling forever.

His life journey has taken him through places as diverse as Falkirk, Nottingham, Madrid, Dublin, Bois-d’Arcy in France and Getxo in the Basque Country, before finally settling in Cantabria. Today he lives between Cantabria and Madrid, where he works in IT, administering and supporting HCL Domino environments for a Swiss bank. This balance between technical stability and creative curiosity defines much of who he is today.

As an IT engineer, Alejandro moves comfortably through complex systems, invisible structures and precise languages. Yet rather than experiencing technology as a cold domain, he treats it as narrative material and a creative playground. It is no coincidence that, on the last Friday of each month, he allows himself a small ritual: writing short pieces for the bank’s internal IT chat, where the IT world is transformed into humour, irony and shared complicity, celebrating its absurdities, impossible acronyms and peculiar humanity. In that space, logic and imagination meet.

Writing is where all his lives converge. His work belongs to a contemporary magical realism rooted in personal experience, memory, technology and cultural heritage, exploring the blurred boundary between the real and the fantastic. In his stories, the everyday opens up to let the unusual, the symbolic and the poetic slip through, as if magic were always on the verge of revealing itself in the simplest details.

Ecology, for Alejandro, is not an aesthetic stance but an ethical and vital pillar. His commitment to life, nature and the collective runs through both the way he lives and the way he writes, where the human and the natural intertwine in a fragile yet deeply necessary balance.

A passionate reader of science fiction and fantasy, and influenced by authors such as Neil Gaiman, Isabel Allende, Terry Pratchett and Ursula K. Le Guin, Alejandro understands existence as a hybrid territory where the technical and the magical, the serious and the humorous, the intimate and the collective coexist without contradiction. His path is, in itself, a personal tale of magical realism, where every place, every system and every story hides more than it shows at first glance.

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