Augusto José Roa Bastos (1917 - 2005)

Born 13 Jun 1917 in Asunción, Paraguay

Died 26 Apr 2005 at age 87 in Asunción, Paraguay

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Biography

Augusto was born in 1917. He 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 José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the eccentric dictator of Paraguay who ruled with an iron fist, 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.

He passed away in 2005.

Sources

• Centro Virtual Cervantes. (n.d.). Augusto Roa Bastos. Retrieved May 06, 2021, from https://cvc.cervantes.es/actcult/roa/cronologia/cronologia01.htm
• "Family Tree," database, FamilySearch (http://familysearch.org : modified 13 February 2021, 04:57), entry for Augusto José Antonio Roa Bastos (PID https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/4:1:L4S5-C5J ); contributed by various users.
• Wikipedia contributors. (2021, April 7). Augusto Roa Bastos. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:20, May 6, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Augusto_Roa_Bastos&oldid=1016480510