El trece de junio/June 13th
Photo (of Roa in the year he won the Premio Cervantes, 1989) from a 2017 El País article on his legacy. Click HERE . ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Augusto Roa Bastos! (1917-2005) A Paraguayan novelist, poet, screenwriter, and journalist, Augusto Roa was considered one of the most important South American writers of the last century. Born in Iturbe, Paraguay, a provincial town where his father was a sugar plantation administrator, he grew up learning to speak both Spanish and Guaraní, the language of Paraguay's indigenous people. He also witnessed the exploitation and oppression of Paraguay's indigenous and poor, an experience that would influence almost all of his later work. When he was ten years old, his parents sent him 120 miles to the north, to Asunción, for his education. There, he lived with his uncle, the liberal archbishop Hermenegildo Roa, whose huge personal library exposed Roa to Spanish literature. Roa served as a medical auxiliary in Paraguay's Chaco War wi...