Latin American Boom Fiction

The Crystal Frontier is a 1995 novel written by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes. The title can also be translated as "The Glass Border". An English translation was published in 1997.

Mario Bellatin is a Mexican-born Peruvian novelist.

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (American Spanish: [ɡaˈβɾjel ɣaɾˈsi.a ˈmaɾkes] (listen); 6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo ([ˈɡaβo]) or Gabito ([ɡaˈβito]) throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha Pardo; they had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (; Spanish: [ˈboɾxes] (listen); 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, as well as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring themes of dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges' works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and majorly influenced the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.

Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages.

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa, more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, is a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist and former politician, who also holds Spanish citizenship. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." He also won the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award, the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes International Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit. In 2021, he was elected to the Académie française.

Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Rulfo Vizcaíno, best known as Juan Rulfo (Spanish: [ˈxwan ˈrulfo] audio ; 16 May 1917 – 7 January 1986), was a Mexican writer, screenwriter, and photographer. He is best known for two literary works, the 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, and the collection of short stories El Llano en llamas (1953). This collection includes the popular tale "¡Diles que no me maten!" ("Tell Them Not to Kill Me!").

Rulfo was born in 1917 in Apulco, Jalisco (although he was registered at Sayula), in the home of his paternal grandfather. Rulfo's birth year was often listed as 1918, because he had provided an inaccurate date to get into the military academy that his uncle, David Pérez Rulfo — a colonel working for the government — directed.

Ernesto Sabato was an Argentine novelist, essayist, painter and physicist. According to the BBC he "won some of the most prestigious prizes in Hispanic literature" and "became very influential in the literary world throughout Latin America". Upon his death El País dubbed him the "last classic writer in Argentine literature".

Rosa Montero Gayo (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈrosa monˈteɾo 'gaʝo]; born 3 January 1951) is a Spanish journalist and author of contemporary fiction.

The daughter of a bullfighter and a housewife, Montero was born in Cuatro Caminos, a district of Madrid. The contraction of tuberculosis forced her to remain at home between the ages of five and nine, and she began reading and writing extensively during that time. She then entered the Beatriz Galindo Institute of Madrid, and at 17, she began her university studies in Madrid University's School of Philosophy and Arts (Facultad de Filosofía y Letras). The following year she was admitted into the School of Journalism, and during her university years she participated in independent theatre groups.

Laura Restrepo (born 1950 in Bogotá, Colombia) is a Colombian author who began writing what were mainly political columns in her mid-twenties. Her first novel, Isle of Passion, is based on historical deeds that occurred on Clipperton Island.

Laura Restrepo is the older of two sisters. Her grandfather was self-educated and spoke six languages. Her father left school age of 13 to go out to work before becoming a businessman. According to Restrepo, her father would take her and her mother with him on his business travels and they never stayed long enough in one place to attend a full year of school. Once she attended a public school in California for only one day because her father took the family somewhere else the next day. When she was around ten years old her formal education consisted of six months at a ceramics night school in Denmark. When she and her family went to Madrid the school did not accept her because she failed the required admission tests for arithmetic, grammar, sewing, and embroidery. So instead she went to a flamenco guitar teacher. Her father took her to visit museums, theaters, ruins, and to climb volcanoes and watch geysers. He introduced her to composers such as Bartók, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. By the time she was 14 she was reading books but did not know the full multiplication table.

Fernando Fernández-Savater Martín (born 21 June 1947 at Basque city of San Sebastián) is a Spanish philosopher, essayist and author.

Born in San Sebastián, he was an Ethics professor at the University of the Basque Country for over a decade. Presently he is a Philosophy professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has won several accolades for his literary work, which covers issues as diverse as contemporary ethics, politics, cinema and literary studies. In 1990, Savater and columnist and publisher, Javier Pradera, founded the magazine, Claves de Razón Práctica.

In November 2012 he was awarded the prestigious Octavio Paz Prize of Poetry and Essay.

In that same year 2012, with issue number 222 (May-June 2012), he became Editor in Chief of "Claves de razón práctica" (Spanish for "Keys for Practical Reason"), a critical thought and cultural crusading review founded by Javier Pradera in 1990, thus giving start to a second era of this prestigious publication, with an editorial board composed of Basilio Baltasar, Francisco Calvo Serraller, Joaquín Estefanía, Carlos García Gual, Santos Juliá and José María Ridao.

Julio Florencio Cortázar was an Argentine, nationalized French novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in America and Europe.

Juan Villoro (born 24 September 1956, in Mexico City) is a Mexican writer and journalist and the son of philosopher Luis Villoro. He has been well known among intellectual circles in Mexico, Latin America and Spain for years, but his success among a wider readership has grown since receiving the Herralde Prize for his novel El testigo.

Juan Villoro received his bachelor's degree in Sociology from the Metropolitan Autonomous University, Iztapalapa campus. He was also part of a short story workshop conducted by Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso. As a rock music fan, he was the DJ for the radio program "El lado oscuro de la luna" (the Spanish translation of The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd) from 1977 until 1981. He was then made the cultural attaché to Berlin in the then German Democratic Republic.

Elena Poniatowska  audio  (born May 19, 1932) is a French-born Mexican journalist and author, specializing in works on social and political issues focused on those considered to be disenfranchised especially women and the poor. She was born in Paris to upper class parents, including her mother whose family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. She left France for Mexico when she was ten to escape the Second World War. When she was eighteen and without a university education, she began writing for the newspaper Excélsior, doing interviews and society columns. Despite the lack of opportunity for women from the 1950s to the 1970s, she evolved to writing about social and political issues in newspapers, books in both fiction and nonfiction form. Her best known work is La noche de Tlatelolco (The night of Tlatelolco, the English translation was titled "Massacre in Mexico") about the repression of the 1968 student protests in Mexico City. She is considered to be “Mexico's grande dame of letters” and is still an active writer.

John Katzenbach is an American author of popular fiction. Son of Nicholas Katzenbach, former United States Attorney General, Katzenbach worked as a criminal court reporter for the Miami Herald and Miami News, and a featured writer for the Herald's Tropic magazine. He is married to Madeleine Blais and they live in western Massachusetts.