Collection: Juan Carlos Onetti

Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, but began writing in Buenos Aires in the late 1930s. Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa described Onetti as "one of the great modern writers, not only in Latin America." He published short stories in La Nación and in the magazine Sur, founded by Victoria Ocampo and Jorge Luis Borges. He then proceeded to write novels centered around the imaginary town of Santa María, which he described through a complex, poetic, and existentialist prose in "Los Astilleros," "Juntacadáveres," and "La vida breve". He was exiled to Spain in 1976, where he worked as a writer for El País and several Latin American newspapers. His lyrical stories and compact novels awarded him the Cervantes Prize in 1980 and the Rodó Prize in 1991.