As Variety reports, Carmen Machi has been set as the lead in BOOM AGENCY TV series which will chart the life of Carmen Balcells who was prime architect of the Latin American Boom and the literary agent and of

Carmen Machi will lead the new show

Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. A co production between Chile and Spain, it will follow a legend in literary circles, Balcells, who is relatively unknown to the general public. She established the Carmen Balcells Literary Agency in 1956 at the age of 25 in a fusty Spain still under the arcane rule of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship but rocked by tourism, then the Beatles and Cuba’s Revolution. She had everything against her. She was born in a village, rather than into Barcelona’s elite. She championed Latin American writers when Barcelona looked up to France. Balcells’ luck was to champion writers who were revolutionizing Latin American literature, abandoning its stolid social realism for a belated but thorough going modernism! The worldwide fame of Gabriel García Márquez is based on the flamboyant “magical realism” of “100 Years of Solitude.” But it also owed much to the commercial aggression of Balcells, which, for example, allowed a young Vargas Llosa to dedicate himself totally to writing. The story will also deal with her worst nightmare, the rupture of the deep friendship between her star writers, Llosa and Marquez, whose rift broke the back of the Boom.