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Augusto Roa Bastos Biography

Augusto Roa Bastos

(Asunción, 1917-2005) Paraguayan narrator and poet, undoubtedly the most important writer of his country of the 20th century and one of the great novelists of Latin American literature.He spent his childhood in the town of Iturbe, a place that inspired many of his creations.In 1932 he ran away from home to enlist in the army during the Chaco War.Those years, during which he remained in the rear, were crucial in providing him with anecdotes and experiences that would feed his literature.

Augusto Roa Bastos

Since 1936 he worked in Asunción as a journalist for El País , of which he was later director.At that time, with Josefina Pla, Hérib Campos Cervera and a few others, he began what would become the Paraguayan poetic renewal of the 1940s.In 1944 he traveled to Great Britain, at an invitation from the British Council, and worked there as a correspondent for his newspaper and also at the BBC in London, where he was the first Paraguayan announcer.

From 1985 onwards he was an active opponent of the Stroessner government and acted as an unofficial ambassador for the National Accord in Europe.In February 1986, he published an Open Letter to the Paraguayan people, which was widely circulated within the country and which demanded a peaceful transition to democracy.Shortly after the fall of Stroessner he returned to Paraguay.In November 1989 he received the Cervantes Prize.

His later publications include the novels Vigil del Admiral (1992), The Prosecutor (1993), Contravida (1994 ) and Madama Sui (1995).He also published plays and numerous anthologies of stories such as Feet over water (1967), Present body and other stories (1971), Fight until dawn (1979), Personal Anthology (1980) and Telling a story and other stories (1984).

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