Augusto Roa Bastos
| Augusto Roa Bastos | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
June 13, 1917 Asunción, Paraguay |
| Died | April 26, 2005 (aged 87) Asunción, Paraguay |
| Occupation | Writer, journalist, professor |
| Nationality | Paraguayan |
| Genre | Dictator Novel |
| Literary movement | Latin American Boom |
| Notable works | |
| Notable awards | Miguel de Cervantes Prize 1989 |
Augusto Roa Bastos (June 13, 1917 – April 26, 2005) was a Paraguayan novelist and short story writer. As a teenager he fought in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia, and he later worked as a journalist, screenwriter and professor. He is best known for his complex novel Yo el Supremo (I, the Supreme) and for winning the Premio Miguel de Cervantes in 1989, Spanish literature's most prestigious prize. Yo el Supremo explores the dictations and inner thoughts of Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who ruled Paraguay with an iron fist and no little eccentricity from 1814 until his death in 1840.
Roa Bastos' life and writing were marked by experience with dictatorial military regimes. In 1947 he was forced into exile in Argentina, and in 1976 he fled Buenos Aires for France in similar political circumstances. Most of Roa Bastos' work was written in exile, but this did not deter him from fiercely tackling Paraguayan social and historical issues in his work. Writing in a Spanish that was at times heavily augmented by Guaraní words (the major Paraguayan indigenous language), Roa Bastos incorporated Paraguayan myths and symbols into a Baroque style known as magical realism. He is considered a late-comer to the Latin American Boom literary movement. Roa Bastos' canon includes the novels Hijo de hombre (1960; Son of Man) and El fiscal (1993; The Prosecutor), as well as numerous other novels, short stories, poems, and screenplays.
Roa Bastos was born in Asunción on June 13, 1917. He spent his childhood in Iturbe, a provincial town in the Guaira region where his father was an administrator on a sugar plantation. It was here, some 200 kilometres (120 mi) to the south of the Paraguayan capital of Asunción, that Roa Bastos learned to speak both Spanish and Guaraní, the language of Paraguay's indigenous people. At the age of ten he was sent to school in Asunción where he stayed with his uncle, Hermenegildo Roa, the liberal bishop of Asunción.
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