Roa Bastos, Augusto Antonio

▪ 2006

      Paraguayan novelist and poet (b. June 13, 1917, Iturbe, Paraguay—d. April 26, 2005, Asunción, Paraguay), penned his masterpiece, Yo el supremo (1974; I the Supreme; in bilingual edition), which recounted the life of the dictator Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia and covered more than 100 years of Paraguayan history. Roa Bastos grew up in a country village where his father managed a sugar mill. The village life and its indigenous Guaran language and customs would influence his writing profoundly. A devout patriot, he volunteered as a hospital assistant in the Chaco War (1932–35) against Bolivia. In the 1930s and '40s, he lived in Asunción, working as a journalist for El País newspaper and writing poetry and fiction. The 1947 Civil War in Paraguay brought the dictator Gen. Alfredo Stroessner to power, and Roa Bastos, who had sided with the defeated rebels, went into exile in Buenos Aires. There he produced some of his finest works of fiction, including the short-story collection El trueno entre las hojas (1953) and the novel Hijo de hombre (1960). A military coup in Argentina in 1976 forced Roa Bastos to continue his exile in France, where he remained until the fall of the Stroessner regime in 1989. That same year he returned to Paraguay and was awarded the Cervantes Prize.

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