Colombian author Laura Restrepo is laughing so hard there are tears streaming out of her eyes. She’s in town for the International Festival of Authors and we’ve been talking about the funny side of life in Colombia.

"We Colombians are strange people," she says between giggles. "Someone that would go there and hear people laughing would say what is this? How can these people laugh?"

She tells me about how one night a friend she was visiting in New York City received a death threat by cell phone, but that the caller’s pseudonym, "The Donkey," was so ridiculous, they just had to chuckle about it. That another friend being pursued by authorities engineered a lucky get-away at a roadblock search when the officer checking for his tell-tale scar didn’t notice he was showing his right leg instead of his left.

One night there was bombing and shooting just outside her Bogota apartment and when the bullets began sounding on her son’s windows he came to sleep in her room only to hear bullets crack against her windows mere minutes later. They ended up laughing together as they traipsed back and forth between the rooms hoping for a good night’s sleep.

"Death, risk and danger are ugly things, terrible things and when death strikes it’s a tragedy," she says. "But when you manage to escape it by just a little then it’s funny. So people keep telling you funny stories about the way they escaped and we laugh about it."

Restrepo spends a great deal of time listening to Colombians’ stories. A former journalist, she begins each novel with months of interviews. She tells me Colombians are eager to share their personal histories and will talk for hours about their lives. "Their lives are very hard, very heroic in many ways," she says. "In spite of all of the devastation that’s going on, people have a sense that they’re trying to make a better world and they like to tell you how they are doing that."

Born in Bogota in 1950, Restrepo spent her childhood traveling around the world with her family in a Volkswagen camper. She returned to Colombia for university and then dedicated herself completely to the political opposition. In 1984 she was exiled to Mexico when the then president’s peace pact disintegrated into bloodbath.

Restrepo’s first novel, La Isla de la Pasion (1989) was inspired by her investigative journalism work in Mexico. Returning to Colombia, she wrote for the political section of Semana magazine and reported on the drug trade. Her subsequent novels, Leopard in the Sun (1993), The Angel of Galilea (1995) and her latest, The Dark Bride (2002) are fictionalized amalgams of the many Colombians she’s interviewed.

Her research for The Dark Bride led her to a remote Colombian oil town where she talked to the oil workers and prostitutes who founded the town. Restrepo explains that in the 40s and 50s, when the book takes place, oil workers were arriving from all over the world and prostitutes followed. Now in their 80s, these city founders led difficult, atypical lives, struggling together for workers’ rights.

In writing The Dark Bride, Restrepo was very interested in trying to understand others’ morals and portraying the validity of moral ideas that may be different from our own. As such, much of the novel deals with the lives of prostitutes. "Prostitution is as a strange place to visit as Colombia," she says. "It’s interesting taking people to Colombia through my books."

Restrepo has discovered that when she does interviews she has to get everything down the first time. Sometimes when she goes back with further questions her interview subjects are dead.

Colombia is one of the most violent countries in the world. More than 50 000 Colombians die violently every year. Millions have been displaced by an ongoing civil war. The drug war complicates things even further - The U.S. has been fumigating crop land and rain forests to eradicate coca plants while powerful drug lords continue to escalate violence. Restrepo believes that the country itself is dying and will no longer exist in 10 years. She asserts that while Colombians must continue to struggle for democracy, drug addiction is a health problem, not a legal or military matter and that international governments must legalize cocaine.

"The war on drugs is a most absurd thing. The business keeps getting bigger every day and Colombians keep dying every day," she says. "When they legalize cocaine will someone be responsible for the destruction and devastation of the Amazon jungle? Will someone remember that there was a country named Colombia?"

Restrepo speaks with great sadness of the guilt she says her generation of Colombians feels over not being able to improve the country’s situation for their children. Although her novels have been translated and read all over the world, she believes her books are only a tiny legacy - a remembrance.

"In the huge problem we are talking about, what is writing? What can you do with writing?" she asks.

Restrepo is overly humble. When she tells me about how Colombians love dancing so much they will risk their lives by going to popular dance halls in dangerous areas, she is describing individuals intent on finding their own corners of happiness in spite of war. This is how civilians fight a war - by living instead of hiding; by overcoming fear instead of falling victim to it; by speaking out instead of falling mute.

I am awestruck by Restrepo. She exudes an irrefutable love of life and an inherent dignity that supercede the horrific details of war she speaks of. Her joyfulness is infectious and powerful. And yet at the same time she quotes a Colombian poet who says "the time has come when we have more friends in the cemeteries than bars."

As Restrepo continues to write, telling Colombians’ stories to an international audience of readers, she is a witness to the lives that are disappearing. By writing their stories she has found her own way to save them.