Mario Benedetti

Mario Benedetti Farrugia, born in Paso de los Toros, Uruguay, in 1920 and died in 2009, was a Uruguayan journalist, novelist and poet and an integral member of the Generación del 45. He published more than 80 books and was translated into twenty languages, and in the Spanish-speaking world he is considered one of the most important Latin American writers of the later twentieth century, though he was not well known in the English-speaking world. He learned German at the Deutsche Schule Montevideo and became the first translator of Franz Kafka in Uruguay. He wrote for the weekly Marcha from 1945 until the military government closed it in 1973, and in 1960 published his best-known novel, La Tregua (The Truce), translated into 19 languages. He lived in exile from 1973 to 1985 and returned to Uruguay when democracy was restored.