Antonio Di Benedetto

Born on 2 November 1922 in Mendoza, in the shadow of the Andes, Antonio Di Benedetto was the son of an Argentine father and a mother of Brazilian nationality, both of Italian descent. He spent his early childhood in Bermejo, began school in Mendoza in 1927, studied law, and then gave himself to journalism, becoming deputy editor of the Mendoza daily Los Andes and a correspondent for La Prensa. He had been writing stories since adolescence, with Dostoevsky and Pirandello as his first masters. His collection Mundo animal (1953) won a national prize from a jury headed by Borges, and in 1956 came Zama, the novel that rests his reputation: the monologue of a Spanish magistrate stranded in colonial Asunción in the 1790s, waiting for a transfer that never comes. It was praised and little read. El silenciero (1964), a novel of a man driven mad by noise, and Los suicidas (1969) followed, and he refused to leave Mendoza and his newspaper to court the literary world of Buenos Aires. On 24 March 1976, the day of the military coup, he was arrested at his desk at Los Andes. He was held for about a year and a half, tortured and subjected to mock executions, and was released in September 1977 after Ernesto Sabato and Heinrich Böll, among others, intervened. In prison he could not keep manuscripts, so he wrote stories as letters to friends; they became the collection Absurdos (1978). He went into exile, teaching in France and then living about six years in Madrid, and returned to Argentina in 1984. His last novel, Sombras, nada más, is a dreamlike book set in an artists' colony in New Hampshire. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973 and the Konex Platinum Award in 1984. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Buenos Aires on 10 October 1986, aged sixty-three. Zama reached English readers in 2016, and Lucrecia Martel filmed it in 2017.

On 24 March 1976, the day the generals seized power, Di Benedetto was arrested at his desk at Los Andes, the Mendoza newspaper where he was deputy editor. He was held for about a year and a half, tortured and put through mock executions. Without paper of his own, he sent stories out of prison in letters to friends.