Augusto Roa Bastos

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Augusto Roa Bastos, (June 13, 1917 – April 26, 2005), was a Paraguayan novelist, widely acclaimed as one of the greatest that nation has produced. He was best known for Yo el Supremo (1974; translated as "I, the Supreme"), one of the foremost Latin American novels to tackle the question of dictators and dictatorships, in the person of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who ruled Paraguay with an iron fist and no little eccentricity for 26 years in the early 19th century. His other major work was Hijo de Hombre (1960; "Son of Man"); he also wrote numerous other novels and stories.

He was born and spent his childhood in Iturbe, a small town some 200 km to the south of Asunción, the capital, where his father worked as an estate manager. In 1932, with the outbreak of the Chaco War, he dropped out of school and joined the troops as a medical auxiliary; the horrors he experienced during this time set him firmly against violence for the rest of his life. After the war, his first jobs were as a bank clerk and reporter on the Asunción daily El País; around the same time, he also began writing for the theatre. During World War II he was invited to London by the British Council; he also served as the El País war correspondent in London and covered the Nuremberg Trials for that paper.

In 1947, because of his activities in opposition to President Higinio Morínigo during the Paraguayan Civil War, he was forced to flee the country. He settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he published most of his work. With the arrival of the military dictatorship in 1976, however, he left Argentina for France, where he taught Guarani and Spanish literature at the University of Toulouse. He did not return to his native Paraguay until 1989, following the downfall of Alfredo Stroessner. That same year, he was awarded the Premio Cervantes (Cervantes Prize), awarded by the Spanish Royal Academy and its correspondent academies in the various American nations, in recognition of outstanding contributions to the Spanish-language novel; he spent the prize money on educational and literary projects in Paraguay.