Paraguayan · b. 1917
Augusto Roa Bastos was Paraguay's greatest writer, a central figure of Latin American literature and winner of the Cervantes Prize, best known for the monumental 'dictator novel' I the Supreme.
Augusto Roa Bastos spent much of his life in exile from a series of Paraguayan dictatorships, and the themes of power, oppression, and his country’s troubled history run throughout his work. He wrote in Spanish, often inflected with Guaraní, the indigenous language of Paraguay.
His masterpiece, I the Supreme (Yo el Supremo, 1974), is a monumental, formally radical “dictator novel” reimagining the rule of Paraguay’s nineteenth-century dictator Dr. Francia — a polyphonic, linguistically dazzling meditation on absolute power, history, and language that stands among the great achievements of the Latin American Boom. His earlier novel Son of Man is also highly regarded.
Awarded the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious honor in Spanish-language literature, Roa Bastos is recognized as one of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century. He died in 2005.
by Augusto Roa Bastos
Augusto Roa Bastos's monumental 'dictator novel,' reimagining the rule of Paraguay's Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. A dazzling, fragmentary, polyphonic meditation on absolute power, history, and language itself, it is a landmark of Latin American literature and one of the great novels of tyranny.
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