César Aira (born 23 February 1949 in Coronel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province) is an Argentine writer and translator who writes in Spanish and has published more than a hundred books. He is one of the most prolific figures in contemporary Argentine literature, and his work, often in the form of short novels, has earned him an international readership. Translation has long been his day job, and it has brought him into close contact with writers from France, England, Germany and elsewhere.
He grew up in a family of Galician descent and moved in 1967 to Buenos Aires, to the Flores neighbourhood, where he has lived ever since. In Coronel Pringles he had befriended the poet Arturo Carrera, with whom he founded the magazine El Cielo in 1968; it lasted only three issues. From the early 1990s he has published one or two books a year, usually brief, which he has described as Dadaist fairy tales or literary toys for adults.
His fiction resists convention. Many of his stories switch genre partway through, borrow from popular culture and science fiction, and end openly or abruptly. He often writes in the first person and draws on his hometown, sometimes as a setting and sometimes as a target for mockery. His working method, which he calls a flight forward, means improvising ahead rather than revising what he has already written, a idea that owes something to the surrealists' automatic writing.
His breakthrough came in the 1990s with How I Became a Nun, which El País named one of the ten best Spanish-language fiction titles of 1993, and his reputation grew with prizes including the Roger Caillois (2014), the Manuel Rojas (2016) and the Formentor (2021). He has been mentioned several times as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. His legacy lies in making speed, invention and experiment central to recent Argentine writing, and in championing neglected figures such as Osvaldo Lamborghini and Alejandra Pizarnik.
Key works
- Cómo me hice monja (How I Became a Nun, 1993): a short novel, narrated in the first person, that the Spanish press named among the year's best fiction.
- Ema, la cautiva (Emma, the Captive, 1981): one of his best-known early novels, set in nineteenth-century Argentina.
- La liebre (The Hare, 1991): another return to nineteenth-century Argentina, in a strange, fable-like register.
- Las curas milagrosas del Doctor Aira (The Miraculous Cures of Dr. Aira, 1998): a fiction in which the author appears as a character and mocks his own world.
- Las noches de Flores (2004): a story set in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood where he lives.
Curiosities
A book picked by a Spanish newspaper
In 1993 the Spanish daily El País included *How I Became a Nun* among the ten best works of fiction of the year, which brought him international attention.
A literary inheritance
He served as literary executor of the complete works of his friend, the poet and novelist Osvaldo Lamborghini, helping to bring his writing to light.
Teachers and influences
Influenced by
- Jorge Luis Borges 1899–1986
- Marcel Duchamp 1887–1968
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.