Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier was a Cuban novelist, essayist and musicologist, born in 1904 and died in 1980, who profoundly shaped Latin American literature in the years before its celebrated literary "boom." Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, to French and Russian parents, he was raised in Havana and kept a strong Cuban identity throughout his life and career. He is remembered as a pioneering practitioner of what he called "lo real maravilloso," the marvelous real, a technique for treating the extraordinary dimensions of Latin American history and culture as continuous with the everyday; his best-known novel, The Kingdom of This World (1949), drew on Afro-Cuban traditions and the Haitian Revolution to develop the idea, and his work is widely credited as a forerunner of the magical realism that later Latin American writers made famous.